Often unsung heroes of the gaming world, physics simulation, content development, and digital media service provider Havok celebrates 10 years of their logo showing up all over the damn place.
Trying to create your own PC game of you and your friends shooting up your high school but lacking the physics and animation technology to bring the whole project together? Well if you can wait a few months, you can use the same tools you’ve seen flashed countless times on your TV and computer monitor over the past several years – Havok. Havok is releasing their industry-leading Havok Complete toolset completely free in May. Havok Complete combines the Havok physics engine with Havok Animation, and is already used in over 200 triple-A titles on the market today. “This is fantastic news for commercial PC game developers as well as the independent game development community, who will really benefit from this move,” said Mark DeLoura, creator of the Game Programming Gems series.
Indeed fantastic news, as having powerful tools freely available can really help foster creativity across the industry, while also expanding the market for Havok’s add-on products, like the recently announced Cloth and Destruction apps. An extremely long press release follows.
The Havok engine just got a much-needed kick in the fluttering cloth pants with the unveiling of Havok Cloth and Havok Destruction at GDC, two products that will provide developers unprecedented control over cloth and destruction in their games. Havok Cloth, as seen in the video above, allows for scalable clothing that will stretch and flow as a character moves, while Havok Destruction is all about breaking stuff – dynamic fracturing, shattering, and deformation of objects. While just a nifty video clip to the layman, this is exactly the sort of thing that gives game developers – male and female alike – intense, uncomfortable erections. Hit the jump for the full press release. More »
This year’s Game Developers Conference page just updated with a slew of new information including the floorplans for the new show. Is it just me or is it starting to look more and more like E3? This could be in part driven by Microsoft’s continued commitment to the show. This year their meeting room and suite space looks to be more than twice the size of Nintendo’s and Sony’s combined. Epic’s is also insanely large, though they have a lot of sales to do for their engine, so I can see them going big at GDC.
Two more maps on the jump.
Egads. This well and truly marks the end of AGEIA and its PhysX hardware physics processor. Havok already has a commanding lead – or should that be a monopoly – on the physics middleware business, and this will only make it bigger, better and more ragdoll-y.
So, it’s up to Unreal Tournament 3 to bring back the biff for AGEIA – but I don’t see that happening. Take BioShock, based on Unreal Engine 3, which includes PhysX by default. 2K Australia/2K Boston went to the trouble of replacing PhysX with Havok. When you consider the former is free while the latter is not… well, it’s bad tidings for AGEIA indeed.
Full press release after the jump. More »
