GDC '08 - Havok Announces Two New Engines, Havok 5.5
 

A couple of days ago, Havok, one of the best known Engine developers, announced Havok 5.5, and two new engines - Havok Destruction and Havok Cloth.

Havok 5.5
The updated toolset announced brings major enhancements to it's core product: Havok Physics, Havok Animation, and Havok Behavior.

Havok Physics 5.5 enjoys a new level of multiplatform physics optimizations, as well as collision query advancements specifically for the PlayStation 3. Havok Animation 5.5 boasts improved performance, lower memory requirements, and more sophisticated tools for compression and exporting tasks. Havok Behavior 5.5 benefits from a variety of asset management enhancements including improved global character positioning and modified visualization of behavior trees.

Havok Destruction
Havok Cloth
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Both of the new Havok Engines will be released in mid-2008, and have complete out-of-the-box integration with the core Havok 5.5 engines.

Just to demonstrate what Havok Cloth can do, here's a video. I'm still looking for a Havok Destruction one.

http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/17589

That's very impressive, don't you think? Cloth is one of the harder things to do in games (along with other fluid motions - such as water, fire, and gasses), and this engine might be the answer to the problems devs have with cloth.

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http://www.havok.com/content/view/580/53/
http://www.havok.com/content/view/578/53/

I don't follow this stuff closely, but this looks cool.

http://gamevideos.com/video/id/17664

Malleability for the win.

Part of the Destruction Package, I assume?

Methinks you're right.

And it looks good, particularly the way the metal bends and twists... I didn't think much of the concrete shattering, though - it looked like it was pre-scripted to break in a certain way.

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I might as well put it in here, and for comparison I'll link to a Euphoria tech demo.

During the Microsoft GDC Keynote, Epic announced GeoW2, and also some enhancements to Unreal Engine 3. Better lighting, destruction, and materials (in the demo they showed a cube of meat and a sphere of liquid metal. The metal looked good, but the meat was far too... wobbly):

http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/853/853510p1.html (Video near the bottom)
http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/854/854138p1.html (Written analysis)

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And the Euphoria tech demo that was released a couple of years ago:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/17054.html
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/17055.html

The second video also shows off the character interaction with the environment, controlled completely by the engine. Euphoria was used in the last Madden game, and is used to some degree in the new GTA, but how much I don't know. Some reckon it's only use comes in the drunk-driving scenes.