> wondered how hard it would be to do a physics engine from scratch It's extremely easy to get started with the basics, and then there's a long ramp of increas

> wondered how hard it would be to do a physics engine from scratch It's extremely easy to get started with the basics, and then there's a long ramp of increasingly difficult features you can implement. So if you're doing it for fun/learning, it's a great project. One of my first programming projects when I started learning Java in high school was a 2D physics system. Just took the equations from my physics class and implemented them in code and bam, you have particle physics. And then I figured out how to make those particles into circles with collision and added infinite lines for them to bounce off of, without really knowing what I was doing. Then in an early CS class in college my team for a project did a similar engine but with arbitrary equilateral polygons for colliders. We had someone who already knew the math for doing those intersection checks, so it wasn't too hard. But yeah: things obviously get hard at a certain point, but it's not one of those projects where you don't see any satisfying results until you've mastered it.