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These are my regular updates on my progress on Pixel Storm for February 2026! Updates from the previous month are here: January 2026 Pixel Storm Updates
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February 1, 2026 11:12 PM (PST) I did it. I finished the book. Now comes the hard part of migrating my particle engine to a rigid body physics engine!!! 😨
I’m so glad to have finish the book though. I read the entire book from beginning to end and read every word. I even implemented half of it already. Now for the next half.
February 1, 2026 12:11 PM (PST) Goal for today is to just get through the rest of the Game Physics Engine Development (2nd Ed) book. That’s 100 pages, which is what I have left to read. I just need to knock it out. I am not going to be able to do anything until I have read the rest of the book, I will have to go back and reread sections as I try to make it work. It’s pointless to read it slowly and carefully I just need build the high level understanding, get the book done and start putting the work in. I’m kind of in paralysis because I want to add the physics in to actually have a game and not waste anymore time on side quests like I did with the imgui back and the procedural sky last month. I just want a game already. The physics are a blocker and nothing else is. I’ll be able to reuse this physics code for future games, so this is a big one time fixed cost.
After a busy January during which I built a procedural atmosphere, a BVH collision system, and an entire CUDA software rasterizer for imgui, here are my goals for February:
Rigid Body Physics — Finish working through the rigid body chapters in Game Physics Engine Development (2nd Ed) and get a rigid body physics engine integrated into the game alongside the existing particle physics. I would like to get that done this month.
Lighting & GI — Start working on proper lighting and global illumination. Now that the sky and atmosphere are physically based, the lighting should follow suit with better light intensity, shadows, and ideally some form of indirect illumination.
Stretch: Game UI — If time permits, start building out the actual game UI using the CUDA rasterizer built in January. The system was deliberately designed with custom vertex types decoupled from imgui, so it should be reusable for game UI elements.
February 1, 2026 2:45 AM (PST)
I still have a hundred pages to read in Game Physics Engine Development (2nd Ed). The last section of the book, starting at the rigid body physics section is kind useless until you finish the entire book. In the first half of the book I was able to just make progress and write some code each chapter, but now you can’t do anything until you have the full complete picture.
Rigid body introduces torque, but at this point you don’t know how write the collision code, so you can’t actually make use of any of the new torque discussion. Then when you get to collisions, which is like 2 chapters in itself, actually more when it later gets to friction, you do finally get to figure out enough data to create contacts to turn into impulses but you don’t know how to do the math for impulsesw, so then you get to the collision resolution chapter which does tell you how to get impulses, but actually there’s all sorts of problems that need to be resolved first: bodies at rest/microcollisions, friction, and how it all ties together.
So finally 250 pages later you have read a whole lot of math, a whole lot of concepts and have nothing to show for it. Sure, you could do the problems at the end of each chapter, but in order to stay motivated I need to make progress on my game and not work problems in a book. So I am not doing them. I’m going to have to basically upon finishing the second half of the book revisit every portion of it as I try to put it all together.
I really think this book would have been much better if it had just started with collisions. Like you can absolutely not do any physics until you have collisions. It could have been a sweet introduction, and it could have introduced some physics that is viewable on the screen without getting into force generators and add contacts engine code. Just finish collisions. Once you have collisions then do the particle physics engine, then explain torque and start going through the rigid body physics engine with the goal of enabling a reader to build the engine as they read the book. Which is not how this book was written.