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If you are a Go player with an iPad 2, 3 or 4 and would like to beta test Virtual Go

Click here to join the beta test group

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Hello, my name is Kyle Gagner. I stumbled across your blog looking for information on how to make a physics engine, but I found something much more interesting, the game Go. I was completely unaware of Go until then, and now I’m completely obsessed with it. Impatient as ever, I played my first three games online, and my fourth game on a grid drawn on paper with bits of play-dough with a friend of mine at a science fair. After that, I decided to write my own online version of the game. It’s a convenient way to play, especially since I don’t yet own a Go board, but I am much anticipating whatever might come of your Virtual Go project, which promises to be orders of magnitude better. So, I suppose I’m simply writing to thank you for introducing me to go and to express my interest in your project. If there’s anything I can do to help the project, just let me know.

Thank you so much Kyle. I’m so happy I helped you discover Go. Go is awesome!

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My talk is finished and I’m very relieved and proud.

The slides are available in PDF and Keynote.

Please note that my presentation style is completely visual + ad-lib so there are no slide notes.

For details, please refer to the article series supporting the talk.

Thanks again and see you at GDC 2014!

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I’m speaking Tuesday 10AM at the Physics Tutorial Day. See you at GDC!

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Please help support these guys!

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This awesome

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After taking a break last year to focus on God of War: Ascension I’m happy to be back this year speaking again as part of the physics tutorial day at GDC 2013.

In previous years I’ve done talks about how to network physics simulations. Topics typically included such things as: how the internet works, UDP vs. TCP, how to synchronize physics state for large open world physics-based games and recently at GDC 2011, showing attendees different strategies for synchronizing their physics simulations over the network (this is a case where one size definitely does not fit all!)

This year I decided to transition to a pure physics programming talk. The talk is introductory in nature and the goal is to give attendees a good quality introduction to rigid body dynamics, collision detection and collision response. But a talk like this can be quite dry and I prefer to do my talks in the context of a worked example with lots of demos!

So, I combined two things that I love: physics simulation and the ancient board game “go”.

Why go? Well, the game of go is extremely interesting! Plus it has links to the game industry, considering it is the origin of the word “Atari”, which by the way, means something akin to “check” in chess, except not necessarily at the end-game. Also, from a game programmer perspective it’s a vastly interesting game for study, being so far entirely resilient to computer solving. It has been said that there are more potential possibilities in the first 10 moves of go on a 19×19 board than all potential chess games and perhaps this explains why unlike chess, the best go AIs at this point are only capable of playing at the level of a strong amateur.

So there are many reasons why go is interesting, but really, I chose it because I love it, and also because the shape of a go stone is so damned interesting and it has this most fantastic wobble when placed on the board and I wanted to see if I could simulate that!

If you are a student, a hobbyist programmer or even professional and you are interested in writing your own physics engine from scratch then this tutorial would be a very good start.

Come to my talk and you’ll learn:

• How to mathematically define the shape of a go stone
• How to tesselate a go stone so it can be rendered efficiently in OpenGL
• How the go stone moves: an introduction to rigid body kinematics
• How to detect collision between the go stone and the board
• How to calculate the inertia tensor of a go stone and what it means
• How to calculate the collision impulse to apply to make the stone bounce
• How to calculate friction between the stone and the board

Physics for Game Programmers: GDC 2013 Schedule Builder

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