physics
Features
3:00AM Owen Good | About a year ago, you may recall, my brother and I attempted to derive the product of Pac-Man’s metabolic functions. In that spirit, Kotaku has now created its own Bureau of Weights & Measures. More »
Kotaku Bureau Of Weights & Measures Studies Fallout, Physics, Also Beer
3:00AM Owen Good | About a year ago, you may recall, my brother and I attempted to derive the product of Pac-Man’s metabolic functions. In that spirit, Kotaku has now created its own Bureau of Weights & Measures. More » 
Media
Fight Night 4 Is Realistically Slimy
4:00AM Mike Fahey | The new physics engine for EA’s Fight Night Round 4 brings you closer than ever to the true experience of having your head sliding against a large sweaty man’s armpit. More »
News
How Sackboy Learned to Love Physics
3:00PM AJ Glasser | Last night, Media Molecule’s David Smith accepted four awards for LittleBigPlanet at the Game Developers Choice Awards. I’m amazed he’s awake enough to lecture on the game’s physics this morning. More »
Regulars
Sunday Timewaster: Dropping the Ball
4:00AM Owen Good | Physics games are like National Geographic maps. I could stare at them for hours and feel like I learned something even if I couldn’t articulate what I had been doing all this time. More »
OLPC Physics Game Jam
9:20AM Kotaku US Edition | On the weekend of August 29-31, teams of game developers will join the OLPC Physics Game Jam in a race to create a unique physics-based game for the One Laptop Per Child XO Laptop. An OLPC Jam is a sort of intense workathon where developers, artists, and other ‘creatives’ throw themselves at a problem over a short space of time. Previous Jams have created educational and medical resources for use with the OLPC in developing countries and the organisers are confident that the talented geeks putting themselves forward for the Physics Game Jam will come up with something special. All the code will be open source, so it is not impossible that the games created in the Jam will see the light of day in web-based games or other platforms down the line. If you have any coding, game design or artistic chops and fancy helping out, get in touch here. There are prizes — including XO laptops and other goodies — for the best creations, plus a lovely warm feeling from helping a good cause. OLPC Physics Game Jam For an XO [Slashdot] More »
News
NaturalMotion Teams With NVIDIA
7:30AM Mike Fahey | Game developers and publishers should have no trouble at all creating realistic worlds and populating them with realistic people as NaturalMotion and NVIDIA announce a partnership that pairs the former’s morpheme animation engine with the latter’s PhysX technology in one powerful force of realistically moving goodness. “We’re deeply impressed by NVIDIA’s commitment to push physics to new levels of fidelity and performance, and their investment in development and support infrastructure across all platforms,” said Torsten Reil, CEO of NaturalMotion. “NVIDIA’s PhysX technology provides a robust, high-fidelity foundation for our advanced character animation algorithms and tools. Through our close collaboration, we will help game developers bring fully interactive and believable characters to a wide range of games.” It’s two great tastes that taste real together! Hit the jump for more details on the partnership between physics powerhouses. More »
A Half-Life 2 Mod and a History of Video Game Physics
5:30AM Maggie Greene | My undergraduate thesis was long, kinda boring, and involved dead imperialists; two students at McMaster University have created a Half-Life 2 mod called Half-Life Havoc for theirs, and attached a little paper on the history of video game physics. More »
Phun: A 2D Physics Playground
10:55AM Maggie Greene | Not precisely a game, but there has been talk lately of physics (and science in general) in games, and this is a neat little program that’s fun to spend a while playing with. It’s still in beta and has the requisite bugs you might expect, but here’s what the creator has to say about it: Phun is a Master of Science Theises by Computing Science student Emil Ernerfeldt for supervisor Kenneth Bodin at VRLab, Umeå University. The solver is based on work by Claude Lacoursière Phun is meant to be a playground where people can be creative. It can also be used as an educational tool to learn about physics concepts such as restitution and friction. You can snag the download (Windows only for now, but an OSX version is apparently on its way) at the Phun website, where there’s more information. There’s also a thread going over at the GameDev.com forums. More »
News
Havok Gets Cracking, Fluttering
8:00AM Mike Fahey | The Havok engine just got a much-needed kick in the fluttering cloth pants with the unveiling of Havok Cloth and Havok Destruction at GDC, two products that will provide developers unprecedented control over cloth and destruction in their games. Havok Cloth, as seen in the video above, allows for scalable clothing that will stretch and flow as a character moves, while Havok Destruction is all about breaking stuff – dynamic fracturing, shattering, and deformation of objects. While just a nifty video clip to the layman, this is exactly the sort of thing that gives game developers – male and female alike – intense, uncomfortable erections. Hit the jump for the full press release. More »
