C++ Physics engine

 I am currently designing my own physics engine in C++ to familiarise myself with how video game engines work and with low-level optimisation. I'm sharing in this page my progress on the physics engine.

GitHub repo: https://github.com/CASTEL-Florian/Physics-Engine/tree/main 

Project setup and learning OpenGL

For this project, I decided to use the C++ language with OpenGL and GLAD. I followed a tutorial online to learn how to render objects, lighting and use instancing.

Terrain and spheres

The first thing I wanted to try was to generate a terrain using Perlin noise and have a sphere collide with it. A collision is detected if the bottom of the sphere is lower than the height of the terrain. When a collision is detected, the sphere is moved up and its speed is reflected relative to the terrain normal.

Collisions between spheres

In order to have an efficient implementation of the collision detection phase, I implemented a grid-based spatial partitioning: the space is divided into a grid and the program checks for collisions between objects within the same or neighboring cells. I'm also using multithreading and GPU instancing to enhance the performance when dealing with a very high number of spheres.

In the following video, the scene contains 5000 spheres.