Bouncy Ball Physics

Recently, I've watched some videos of physics simulations in other game engines. This got me interested in experimenting with physics and collisions of large number of objects in 3DWorld. 3DWorld supports full physics for spherical objects, including gravity, elastic and inelastic collisions, momentum, friction forces, air resistance, etc. All "large" (non-particle) spheres collide with all objects in the scene, including each other. Spheres are simpler to work with than other object shapes due to their rotational invariance and other factors. Each frame runs multiple physics simulation + collision detection steps on all active (moving) objects. The active object test significantly reduces computation time for common cases where most of the objects have stopped moving. In theory, the collision detection should prevent objects from intersecting each other and the scene.

I added a config file option that reduces weapon fire delay to 0, which allows me to throw a ball every frame. The maximum number of active balls is set to 20,000. At ~100 FPS, it only takes a few minutes to generate 20K balls. Here is a video of me throwing some 10K balls into the office building scene in realtime. See the balls fall and bounce in parabolic trajectories. Note that I've disabled player collision detection to prevent the ball recoil from pushing me around wildly.

Collision detection works for dynamic as well as static scene objects. I can push balls around on the ground using the player model or by pushing a movable object such as a crate into them. They'll go up and down inside an elevator, and fall when pushed over a ledge. I can place objects on a glass surface or in a glass box, shatter the glass, and watch them fall. Even though the balls are stopped, the breaking glass will re-activate their physics and put them back into motion.

Balls will also stack when added to a container so that they're non-overlapping, and will spread out to fill in the gaps just like real world spheres. I have a colored glass box on the third floor of the office building scene that I use for lighting experiments. It's fairly large, so it takes a while to fill with balls. I marked the glass as shatterable in the config file so that I can break it with weapon fire. Here is the video showing the glass plate and glass box experiments. Note that the lighting is static/baked into the scene because the glass box isn't supposed to be destroyable, which is why the lighting looks odd near the end of the video.

This is a high resolution screenshot showing the balls stacked in the glass box. See how closely together they're packed. The collision force of the glass on the balls keeps them inside the volume. It takes several seconds for the simulation to converge to this solution and the balls to stop moving. When the glass is broken, the balls will spill out to form a single layer on the floor.

1000 bouncy balls in a colored glass enclosure. Collision forces keep the balls from intersecting each other and the glass.

There are a number of different ways to apply forces to objects in 3DWorld. Weapon explosions produce force radiating outward from a central point, which affects dynamic objects. Here I use a rocket launcher (named "Seek and Destroy") to create explosions that push the balls around the scene. The following video shows the effect of these explosions on the physics state. This also shows off my neat explosion shockwave postprocessing shader effect. The shader distorts the image by simulating a spherical region of compressed gas with higher index of refraction forming a lens.

The rocket launcher is a crazy weapon to use with zero fire delay! I wouldn't recommend this in real gameplay, it's usually instant death. The small random rocket firing error causes two rockets to occasionally collide in mid-air - they're also dynamic objects. This results in an explosion and chain reaction that sometimes propagates back to the player along the chain of close proximity in-flight rockets, resulting in a high amount of area damage. Oops. Better stick to bullets, or some other non-explosive weapon.