In a game like GTA, for example. You have a huge variety of vehicles, including flying cars and bikes. How does it work? Is it arbritary (“this will fly, period”) or they design It to fly in that universe, according to those rules, Just like they would do in real life?
In: Physics
Depends on the size and scope of the game and the available hardware. I mean you can to some degree make physics simulations and sell them as games and for programmers it might even be easier to apply the same formula to all objects to compute how they should behave rather than to move every piece individually.
However the more objects you have on screen and the more details you treat as objects the more computationally expensive that’s going to be and so instead of computing accurately how every leaf is moving you just render animations for your 4 weather conditions and call it a day.
Edit: And in terms of how you do these simulations, well you essentially compute them step by step. So while in real physics you’d compute a mathematical formula that gives you a value for every small number and the interval between them. Well the computer just computes the values and then computes the values for what happens x milliseconds down the line and assumes that nothing has significantly changed in between. Now the smaller the intervals the closer to reality (unless you’re dealing with chaotic systems).
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