The folks at N creator Metanet Software have been posting some absolutely fascinating, uber-technical blog pieces recently, and the latest is an in-depth look at creating the physics for their upcoming title Robotology, posted in two parts.

It's explained of their plans to create a suitable complex physics system for their indie title: "Thankfully, Mare came up with a fantastic plan: rather than scrambling about randomly, we would make a list of technologies which were known to solve the problems we were facing, and then systematically try to implement each one until we found something that worked. If nothing worked, we would revise our design to fit with whatever our technology could handle. The genius of this plan, amazingly, was that it was a plan: a nice, simple recipe for accomplishing a goal."

You should be aware that it then goes into insane detail about different ways to set up game physics solvers, but come on, the second post has insane paragraphs like this: "The point is, “Jakobsen + Stick-Based Rigid Bodies + SomeFantasticMagicGoesHere” was an oft-pursued, ever-elusive goal around here, which led to a few successes; aside from Jamie’s method, we also had some success implementing an alternate method of collision response (the method in (1a) only works for triangles, not for sticks) based on an obscure thesis written by Jeroen Wagenaar — who worked with Jakobsen on his method." What's not to like?