It's not that I don't like to rely on engines, If you you are planning on make a game it is far more effiecient to use and engine to make the game. Instead of spending years making your own engine and then more time making the game you can just start making the game by using a game engine. Most game companies do that, they implement havok physics engine, they use third party graphics engines, game engines, animation engines and everyting in between. So I understand I should not reinvent the wheel when it comes to that. That being said I feel that it is important to know how the engine works in case you want to add you own libraries to engines. I have been studying opengl breifly to try and understand how .draw methods and other graphics work. I also believe that just using methods from other peoples libraries is good when you start learning but is also a plateau, eventually you need to be able to create classes, add libraries, etc.
About using a physics engine: If phrogram dosen't have a physics engine and dosen't have a way of implementing a third party physics engine then the only way of using physics methods is to do it yourself, that is what I was saying I would like to try. I could rely on phrograms collision detection. But as far as momentum or gravity is concerned there are no methods that handle them. So after taking an introductory college level physics class I have learned the basics about gravity, acceleration, mass, force, etc. So with my knowledge of that material I thought It would be interesting to try and implement those concepts in phrogram. I have already begun work on the momentum/acceleration/mass class. The gravity class is on the back burner, because gravity is relative. I know that earths gravity is 9.8 m/s^2 but how does that relate to a game world. Would it be better to create an arbitrary gravity that made everthing fall as expected within the game? I have also been looking out how particle engines are done in other engines. I realize that it would be more difficult to do a particle engine in phrogram because I would have to use objects instead of sprites( this is also on the back burner).