Using a physics engine still requires understanding how to calculate the forces you want to apply which requires a fair understanding of basic mechanics at the

Using a physics engine still requires understanding how to calculate the forces you want to apply which requires a fair understanding of basic mechanics at the very least. There are also definitely people writing their own physics. I did so myself not that long ago for a project. For our constrained problem it only took a week to get going. Then you have the case where you want to write a controller that has physics like behaviour that isn’t readily achievable with middleware easily. A good understanding of the principles behind physics engines helps a lot here. For example the ship motion here is a rigidbody sim I wrote from scratch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs1p22oI_V4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs1p22oI_V4 Whereas all the locomotion of individual players including them jetpacking around is hand written behaviour with a simpler Euler integrator for linear motion only. You can try that directly: https://dotbigbang.com/game/3772901474b3423fa21e20bdf0a84cf4/thrust-heroes?mp=hnews https://dotbigbang.com/game/3772901474b3423fa21e20bdf0a84cf4... Then the good old damped spring is an amazingly versatile tool to have available in all sorts of weird places.