Homepage of pooltool

pooltool is an open source sandbox billiards game that emphasizes realistic physics. You can play any form of billiards, experiment with different physics settings, or you use the API to investigate billiards-related research questions. Keep reading for an intro into the topic or scroll down for posts of this blog series.

Backstory

Why am I doing this?

Seven years ago (2013) I was an in undergraduate math class called “Non-linear Dynamical Systems and Chaos” taught by Dr. Anthony Quas at the Univerity of Victoria. The final project was to model a chaotic system, and so Adam Paul (a good friend of mine) and I thought a pool break perfectly fit the description of a chaotic system: a deterministic (non-random) system that exhibits extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. The balls are governed by non-random, simplistic Newtonian physics, yet each break outcome appears unique and irreproducible. And so to study this, we created a physics simulation of the pool break.

It sounds like I’m chalking us up to having accomplished something amazing, but it was all far from impressive. From a physics standpoint, our model was very skeletal, exhibiting instantaneous and elastic collisions with trajectories restricted to 2D.

Basically, we applied conservation of momentum and energy of idealistic particles, and voila, that was our physics.

From an implementation standpoint, we used a discrete time integration approach with a constant time step, and implemented everything with hardcoded variables and spaghetti logic that is physically painful to take ownership of. Here is the product of our efforts:

Not exactly what you would call realistic, or pretty.

Because of the drastic potential for improvement, making a realistic pool simulator has weighed on me for years, and I consider it unfinished business.

As time passed, I got more involved in the game, bought my own table, even joined a league. Concurrently, I started a PhD at the University of Chicago doing computational biology, and developed considerably as a programmer due to my line of research. Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck and I realized I needed something other than work to keep me stimulated during quarantine. That’s when I decided to undertake the project of making a physically accurate pool simulator.

What’s out there?

Before starting, I wanted to scope out what’s currently on the market. Apparently, the most realistic 3D pool simulator is ShootersPool Billards Simulation (see this discussion for comparison with Virtual Pool 4). I checked out some of the demo videos. And boy, are they beautiful.

Both from a graphics and physics perspective, this appears very real. The only physical inaccuracy I can spot is as balls are entering the pockets they seem to undergo a pre-baked animation rather than interacting genuinely with the pocket. Interestingly, this game started as a university project by a software developer / pool player. Goals.

Unfortunately, ShootersPool is a commerical project with closed source code.

Goals

Making a pool simulator is a pretty vague statement that can be ambiguously interpreted. To keep things more concrete, here are the primary goals of this project:

1. Create a physics engine that simulates the trajectories of pool balls that a layman finds indistinguishable from reality.
2. Visualize pool shots using 3D graphics.
3. Make an game that let’s the user play billiard games.
4. Create an AI capable of playing 9-ball.

There is a saying that if one “cannot see the forest for the trees”, they lack the perspective required to see the big picture. The idea is that one can walk up to each tree and comprehend it, but cannot see the larger pattern that is the forest. In contrast to this proverb, I would argue that starting a large project is like being able to see the forest, but unable to see the trees it is composed of. Your vision is the forest: a product of the entire thing. For me, it is the goals I have laid out above. But I can’t yet see the trees that create this vision. This blog post series lays out my journey in trying to achieve these goals.

Blog posts for "pooltool"