Intro to Game Physics with Box2D

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Ian Parberry, Introduction to Game Physics with Box2D, AK Peters Publishers (an imprint of CRC Press, a member of the Taylor & Francis Publishing Group, an Informa Business), 2013.

What's It All About?

The physicist Richard Feynman once said

"Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible."

Introduction to Game Physics With Box2D is a book that is very much in the spirit of his advice: an undisciplined, irreverent, and original book on how to program the physics used in 2D video games. After a little math background and fiddling around with hand-written code for simple rigid body and soft body dynamics, it shows how to make your 2D physics programming problems more manageable by using the Box2D physics engine. I expect you, the reader, to be able to stomach a little math and to be a competent C++ programmer, both approximately at the level that a casual observer might reasonably expect of a non-knuckle-scuffing sophomore or junior in a computer science program at a middling-to-competent state university.

Introduction to Game Physics With Box2D contains five different kinds of material: coding with Box2D (47%), coding without Box2D (24%), mathematics (16%), algorithms (5%), and miscellaneous stuff (8%). The supplementary material below includes executables and source code for two minigames and two toys, YouTube videos, and PowerPoint lecture notes. The source code is written in C++ for Windows using Visual Studio 10 and DirectX 9.

Before You Buy

Where to Buy

Supplementary Material

Created April 10, 2012. Written in HTML 4.01 and CSS 3 using vi. Last updated October 13, 2014.