   what is glass is games
  what exactly is the glass in games that can shatter?, is it a animated mesh or something else?   
  Depends on the game I suppose, but I imagine that in most cases a number of 'glass fragment' entities are spawned (with appropriate positions and orientations) when the glass is broken. These fragments could be anything from fully modeled objects simulated using a physics engine (e.g. PhysX) to simple entities that are given an initial linear and angular velocity and disappear after some short amount of time.   ;  Depends on the game... got pictures/videos of the effect you're thinking of?Usually it's two things - a regular mesh that's replaced with something else when it's broken. The broken version could be a procedural mesh, could be physics objects, could be a particle system, could be an animated mesh...   