Thoughts on the Physics

Choosing what physics to use
When researching into physics I had to choose an appropriate method to simulate physics with realism and performance in mind. There are 4 main options to use which I will go into brief detail below.

• Semi-Implicit Euler comes across as the best option to use for the best accuracy at the most optimal performance.

• Runge Kutta method has the best accuracy by far but performance wise it doesn't seem efficient enough for a game environment. 
• Euler is much too accurate all together for what I want to use since physics are the center of my game.
• Midpoint is like the name suggests a good in between of semi implicit and Runge Kutta but didn't have much recommendation from sources I found

I talked to one of my tutors about which to implement and got told that Semi-Implicit Euler would be the best to use for my project of a mobile physics game. 

Picture found on google. Origin is youtube video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxWBXd7ujx0
Jorge Rodriguez

Project Overview

Pong VR

What is this blog

This blog is to show the progress of my final year project in university. I'm currently studying Computer Games Programming at Teesside University and I'am in my 3rd year of my masters. To help show progress and keep a record of how and when I did stuff I will update this weekly of what I did that previous week.

Idea

My idea was to recreate ping pong inside virtual reality using the Samsung Gear VR headset and the Galaxy s7 edge as the phone to test it on. The game will built within Unity the main two tasks will be creating realistic but smooth physics and a challenging AI as the opposition.

Taken from Samsung's website - http://www.samsung.com/global/galaxy/gear-vr/ 

Why Ping Pong

I knew I wanted to do something within VR and knew I had use of a wireless controller to base this round. The idea went around different type of shooting games or exploring games but at the end of the day I needed an idea that was simple in looks and game play but has a high programming and technical side.

 Choosing a sports game seemed like an obvious choice since creating a custom physics engine is a challenging task and also an interesting one. So what sport do I choose? I was constricted to a sport which uses hands and more specifically one hand since most of the target audience will only own one controller, myself included. I narrowed it down to basketball or ping pong. The reason I chose ping pong is for the AI aspect and how its easier to implement an AI to hit the ball back than to understand the rules of basketball and to also make it fair to not always hit the basket.

Similar Products

There are 2 similar apps currently on the Oculus store for virtual reality. Obviously with ping pong you can't innovate as easy as other idea's. Only one of the apps make use of the gear vr controller and the one that utilities it doesn't factor the rotation and gyroscope of the remote. My goal then with this is to make a better implementation of the system and hopefully it improves the experience.