Game Physics

[DreamScripters]

So basicaly my question that I have thought about for the past couple of days is how come in almost every game that has a 3D environment entities seem to be able to clip through each other? Or just in general glitches. Amnesia itself seems to be pretty prone to entity clipping (Ex: throwing a chair hard enough against a wall that it goes through it.) and even worse. If you have been one of the many people in Amnesia to pick up a mattress then you know what I mean.

But what makes me really think is how such glitches happen. If we go really basic, such as a game like Pong. You wouldn't see such glitches happening obviously. But when you get more complicated such as Amnesia's physics engine you will see these glitches happening quite frequently. When you think of computers or even games you think of very technical things. But its almost the exact opposite with glitches. They almost seem organic in contrast to what you would think of a computer.

So I made a theory to why entities are able to clip through other objects. My theory goes as when you throw a object fast enough in Amnesia and it collides with something it is going so fast that the computer itself can't calculate the collision fast enough to stop it from clipping/glitching. This is why you don't see these type of glitches happening in simple games I believe. Because collisions and other physical interactions are so simple it doesn't take much time to calculate collisions so you don't get the clipping you see in more complicated games. But this is just what I think.

I wanted to make this thread just out of curiosity of what responses I would get and if I could learn a little more about the nature of these glitches. But as far as I know it is not the developers fault that these glitches happen but more of the actual time that it takes to process game events in general. Anyways thanks for reading the post and reply with what you think!