The common theme in this practical, hands-on collection is experience. The contributors write based on their knowledge and skill in developing tools and runtime libraries either in game companies or middleware houses that produce physics software for games on PCs and consoles. Each article describes not only a specific topic, but provides an in-the-trenches discussion of the practical problems and solutions when implementing the algorithms, whether for a physics engine or game application.

The chapters cover topics such as collision detection, particle-based simulations, constraint solving, and soft-body simulation. Several of the topics are about nonsequential programming, whether multicore or for game consoles, which is important given the evolution of modern computing hardware toward multiprocessing and multithreading.