Golf, the beginning

I wanted to buy a book about physics for a while to learn how to make things behave realistically in the future games I wanted to do.  So for Christmas I bought myself "Physics for Game Programmers" by Grant Palmer.  I started reading it then and I was asking myself what kind of game I could make, alone, to use some of the things I've learn in this book.  It's the only physics book I've read so far, but I still recommend it.

So at the beginning of 2011 I started working on a golf game.  There is some physics, but not too much, so it's a good place to start.  I don't have to model complicated 3D things... except if I want to add a character hitting the ball.  So I thought, why not.

So far I concentrated on the UI, so it would be functional and would do what I need it to do... it's not very pretty I guess, but I will spend more time maybe in the future to make nicer textures.  There's also a mini map showing you where the ball is on the terrain.  This map is auto generated when the terrain model is loaded by saving an orthogonal view of the terrain in a texture.

What I also did is use what I've learned about the physics of projectiles in the book to model the flight of the ball.  I need to work on the "rolling part".  But for the "flying part", the ball is "launched" at a certain angle depending on the club you select and with a certain power depending on where you stopped on the meter.  Gravity is affecting the flight pattern as well as air resistance.  The wind, displayed on the UI, also affects the flight of the ball.  You can also affect the spin on the ball in two ways.  First by moving the cursor up or down on the ball, which would make the ball fly higher or fall to the ground faster and depending where you stop the "power meter" the ball could make a hook (spin to the left) or a slice (spin to the right).

It's only a beginning, but here's a video of what I've done so far.