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GameDev.net
Posted by: Drew Sikora at February 20, 2008 1:24:43 PM


Havok™, the premier provider of interactive software and services to digital creators in the games and movie industries, today announced that the company will offer the PC version of its award-winning physics and animation software product – Havok Complete – for download free of charge.

Available for non-commercial use, Havok Complete for the PC will be freely downloadable in May 2008.

Havok’s core platform, Havok Complete combines the industry-leading Havok Physics engine and Havok Animation, the company’s premier character animation solution. Havok Complete is already the most popular solution in the cross-platform AAA games market, featuring technology used in over 200 games. By making Havok Complete for the PC freely downloadable, Havok will further build on its leading position by completely removing the barriers to entry for the large number of independent developers, academic institutions and enthusiasts in the PC space.

“Havok has an excellent revenue base generated by sales of our three products across multiple platforms and into multiple industries,” said David O’Meara, Managing Director at Havok. “This enables us to make an industry-changing move and opens up a much broader market for products such as Havok Behavior – and our new products Havok Cloth and Havok Destruction – that really come alive when adopted on top of our core platform, Havok Complete.”

Havok has entered into an agreement with Intel, Havok’s parent company, under which approved game developers on the PC platform can execute a commercial distribution license with Havok for free.

“Intel is very pleased to be sponsoring this direction in the PC market. This aligns well with our ongoing strategy of putting the best software tools in the hands of PC games developers,” said Renee J. James, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Software and Solutions Group, Intel Corporation.

With the free PC download of Havok Complete, Havok enables broad non-commercial development use for artists and engineers around the world, which Havok believes will boost creative game development throughout the industry.

“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. “It’s great to see a leading middleware company like Havok show such support for PC game developers by making its physics and animation system freely available.”

Havok’s overall focus remains cross-platform and Havok will continue commercial licensing of Havok Complete for other platforms and in other industries such as movies and serious gaming. This initiative does not apply to license fees that may be payable to Havok for console versions of Havok Complete or to applications developed for other purposes such as game engines for redistribution, other middleware, movies, training, military or industrial simulation.

Havok’s physics software is featured in over 200 AAA games available on stores shelves today. With well over 90 games currently in development to be released this year, use of Havok’s ubiquitous software is up 100% over last year at the same time. Best-selling titles featuring Havok physics include: Halo 3, Assassin’s Creed, Guitar Hero III, BioShock, World in Conflict, Half Life 2: The Orange Box, and Heavenly Sword. Havok’s software will also be featured in the highly-anticipated upcoming games Alan Wake, Indiana Jones, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Starcraft II.

With a broad and deep range of tech partners including AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft as well as a host of world-class publishers and developers, Havok is well known industry-wide for its excellent customer service.

In addition to the PC software download, Havok also unveiled two new software products, Havok Cloth™ and Havok Destruction™ at this year’s Game Developers Conference. Havok Cloth and Destruction provide artists with dramatically increased control over interactive cloth and destructible objects within games. The company also announced several new features and enhancements across its award winning modular suite of run-time technology and artist tools.
Havok also celebrated a number of key entertainment and technology awards in 2007, including a National Academy of Television, Arts & Sciences Award, Game Developer Frontline Award, and a Develop Industry Excellence Award.

ah, cool! i'd love to give it a go.

but it's risky to develop something with it that you might sell in future, because then it's either ridiculously expensive or requires a physics-engine switch.

julz

If you want to go risk-free, try PhysX.

Maybe not as advanced as Havok but, IMHO, easier to use. And free.


"The AGEIA PhysX SDK (binary) is 100% free and available right now for download by developers. ...

Free SDK Package:

* Most Current PC Binary
* Commercial & non-commercial use on PC
o Must keep registration information current
o Must agree to the EULA at the time of download (pops up prior to download)
o Available for Windows & Linux
o No PhysX hardware optimization requirement
* PS3 platform (through Sony pre-purchase)"

So what you're waiting for?

I wonder why Conitec won't implement PhysX as it's primary physics engine? The current one(ODE) has to many restrictions and problems.

physx basically is ODE too. novodex just fixed all the (mainly collision detection) problems with it.

i would still wait a bit and see how this will turn out with nvidia. does physx still need this stupid 20mb driver?

maybe bullet or newton would be an option too but ODE really seems to be dead. there weren't any real fixes or improvements since a few years.

havok is all about the tools. the engine itself isn't much more advanced than other physics engines either.

I highly doubt they would stop supporting ATI. It wouldn't make sense, as no developer would use it then. They will most likely just integrate certain aspects of it into it that only Nvidia cards will run faster and more efficiently. But these could ultimately be left as an option in your game, I'm sure the base instructions would run fine across the board.

Anyways, the current free version of PhysX that works with all hardware setups is a step above what's in A7 right now. I don't know how hard it would be to implement it into A7, I haven't really the time to check it out yet, but perhaps Conitec would consider it for the near future. I don't really see why not...

It isn't that hard at all to use PhysX with A7, as a third-party tool.

I don't know if there is any technical or legal issues in integrating it into A7 directly. You will have to ask JCL about that.