Initial Plan

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So I have a plan for how I want to do this project. The goal is to be at least 90% done by the 1st of august 2019. The first thing to do is to setup a scene by which I can demonstrate my solution. None of the scene setup is that relevant to the project per se, but having good visuals are impressive for both graders and potential employers in the future. So what needs to be done is to setup my work environent using Visual Studio and GLFW. I have done this earlier so there may already be such a work environment readily available on my PC somewhere. I think that I also have Lua setup on that environment, which may be useful for making real-time changes to the code, instead of having to recompile a lot of times.

I believe it was a good thing to try to create a rigid body simulation first. I will also do the course "Advanced Graphics and Interaction" as well as a master thesis later on related to graphics and interaction. To me this topic seems like it can provide a solid foundation by which I can learn useful things for later projects. At least when it comes to the animation and interaction part. Also, a lot of computer games use this technology and it is really important. By having a simulation you don't have to manually write a lot of redundant code that at best can't do 1% of what a simulation can do. I feel like I have a lot (too much) freedom on how realistic I want the simulation to be. The more realistic it is, the more complex and computationally expensive it will be. Having a perfect simulation is therefore not very suitable in my opinion, since I am mainly interested in creating something that can run well on consumer grade computers in real-time.

What needs to be done first and foremost is to create a floor by which rigid objects can collide and stay on, so that they don't dissappear. I also want to create a cubemap which is just sort of like a background image for the 3D world.

I have skimmed through the pages on GPU Gems about rigid body simulation. There were a lot of scary mathematical equations which I did not fully understood. I hope that I will just learn better as I go and try to implement things. There are a lot of critical steps in order to make it work apparently and the text uses the GPU for optimization, and the plan is for me to do the same. All of the steps are really advanced, from my perspective, and also not extremely detailed either. A few keywords from the text were "voxels", "discrete element method" and "depth peeling". I will need to learn about these in more detail.

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