Posted by Wade Walker on Oct 09, 2011; 2:38pm
URL: https://forum.jogamp.org/Learning-JOGL-and-related-topics-tp3167983p3407454.html

I'd regard calculus as only a tool (one of many) that we use to model physical reality. Reality is the fundamental thing, not the tools we model it with :)

For game physics, I'd say the concepts of conservation of mass, momentum, and energy are the most important ideas to master. If you understand conservation laws and what they imply, you can model pretty much any Newtonian physics system, at least at the conceptual level.

But for a character jumping under the influence of gravity in a game (which you mentioned before), you can probably just use the projectile motion equations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projectile_motion) to model your character's motion. I think that for almost any situation you'd find in a basic game, somebody somewhere has already set up and solved the equations for it, so no advanced knowledge should be required beyond algebra.

If you were doing something more complex, say writing a physics engine like Havok (http://www.havok.com/index.php?page=havok-physics), you'd be writing your own equations instead of using pre-solved ones. You'd need to know enough calculus to write your model equations down, but you wouldn't necessarily have to be able to solve those equations yourself. A program like Mathematica (http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/) which you can get cheap educational licenses for, can solve most anything you'd come up with in this area. Or if the equations have no closed-form solution, you'd use the algorithms from something like Numerical Recipes (http://www.nr.com/) to solve them in code.

But you shouldn't have to go to that level for your first game :) To program at that level, you'd probably need three semesters of college calculus (through differential equations), plus maybe a statics and dynamics class, and maybe a class in applied mathematics (to learn how to write numerical algorithms).