I have a very vague question and please don’t burn me for this but ive been searching on the internet for some time now and i just cant find a solution: what can i use to write a simple physics engine? I tried java, but theres too much stuff i have to have and download and crap like that (maybe i’m not looking in the right places? again, point me in the right direction please); i tried opengl and c++, too complicated and confusing; i tried a few more but they just dont work. help please?
i’d recomend looking at java again. i dont realy understand what you mean by there is too much to download… all you have to do is download the java jdk and jre, and then an ide like jbuilder (my favorite). to make a physics engine you’d probably have to do an incredible amount of programing in any language you choose. having opengl makes things alot easier as it handles stuff like meshes for you. there is a package for opengl in java called j3d, you just have to seach it. if c++ is to confusing for you, then java is your best bet.
If by simple physics you mean modeling things like motion of objects subject to gravity, force and air friction, why, people were writing those using Basic, 30 years ago. I suspect any half way decent programming language could be used to model or simulate simple physics. Whatever language you go with though, there’s going to be some complicated and confusing parts. If you pick python, there are people around here who might help you out.
A few things: 1. its not c++ thats too confusing, its opengl programming. 2. i dont want meshes like cubes and spheres, i just need point masses. 3. I know python, i guess i could use pygame but i dont really like it. Ill check out java again. Oh and i realized that the java downloads I looked at were bigger than 32 mb, which is fine except this is not the computer i work on and the one i do work on is not hooked up to the internet. anyway ill look again at java…
Yea all the Java6 packages on Ubuntu together are over 90MB if i remember correctly…for what i do with it, it’s a bit bloated indeed…
But if i sum the tools and libs i need for C++ development, it’s not really any better, since you don’t want to re-invent the wheel or manually use the compiler from command line etc…in that regard, with java you have most of the stuff you probably need for such a project, ready to use and nicely documented.
Python might be a good idea if you have it installed anyway, it’s almost everywhere these days 
It might only perform well enough for prototyping, but a couple of blender devs love Python for quick prototyping before they implement it in C(++).
i’m currently using java to program a render engine actualy, i did try j3d, but for whatever reason, could never get anything to compile with it. if you just want point masses, i’d recomend defining your own vector class, your own point class (just vector with a different name), your own orthonormal class, and class for point masses. however for it to be a functional physics engine, you need to be able to compute object intersections (probably where triange verts are transformed to spheres and the path is precalculated), and thus you need to be able to work with meshes, which gets more complicated in any language. i recomend taking some looks at the blender source.