Physics

Remember FIFA!, NFS! how the computer knows, the velocity of a car decreases after hit on a rock or how computer knows, the path of a ball while bending it like Beckham? What's more.., the next generation physics engines will be hardware accelerated, which means its going to be 1000x faster than the current available ones, adding incredible realism to a 3d game!!

Games or simulations normally follow some consistent model of the physical universe. Physical laws dictate that balls bounce when they hit the ground or that a arrows arc upwards then down when fired into the air. More recently, ragdoll physics has become popular as a way of animating characters according to physical models, for example, enabling realistic animation of a person falling after being shot.

Ode - Windows, Mac, *nix ; Free under the LGPL and BSD style license. The Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) is by far the most popular tool for programming physics with.

NovodeX - Windows, Mac, *nix; Windows version free for non-commercial use. This SDK has been widely used, including in the Unreal Engine.

Newton Game Dynamics - Windows, Mac, Linux(x86); Free with minimal restrictions (License). You can integrate Newton Game Dynamics into your projects with ease. With our technology you only need to know basic physics principles to produce realistic physics behavior. Tuning time is reduced to a minimum because you don't need to wrestle the targeted hardware nor set up esoteric parameters to get the correct timing for your simulation. Newton physics engine behaves naturally.

True Axis Physics SDK - Windows, Linux (x86), more; The True Axis Physics SDK is a fast and solid real world physics simulation system designed for demanding games and virtual interactive environments. The SDK is designed from a games developer's perspective. It aims to avoid common issues present in most physics and collision implementations. It aims to give developers the control they need over the way objects behave. Fast physics for games - free for non-commercial use.

The Gangsta Wrapper - An abstraction layer allowing the use of different physics libraries through a consistent API.

OPAL - Open Physics Abstraction Layer, high-level API on top of physics engines, at the moment officially supports only ODE, but more plugins are in development.