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
Quote:
Havok Destruction™ is the cross-platform tool for simulation of rigid body destruction. Destruction gives the game artist total control over the simulation, drastically reducing the production time and cost of creating large numbers of realistic destructible game objects. Havok Destruction can create a completely new game play experience by giving additional realism to structural mechanics, graphical effects and game level design.
Havok Destruction™ features:
• Dynamic fracture of game objects including: shattering, fracture and deformation.
• Software Development Kit that is fully multithreaded, optimized for the PLAYSTATION®3 and Xbox 360® and makes optimal use of Havok Physics
• Art Tool Support
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Havok Cloth
Quote:
Havok Cloth™ is a new performance-optimized development tool designed to minimize the time that game artists spend on animating the behavior of character garments and environmental cloth. It enables increased realism for cutting-edge games, is easily customizable and fits into today’s workflow without burdening artists, animators or programmers.
Havok Cloth™ features:
• Highly realistic physically-based simulation of cloth and character clothing with low CPU and memory overhead
• Multithreaded and platform-optimized (including PLAYSTATION®3)
• Artist-driven control of the full range of cloth behavioral properties such as stretching, damping and bending
• Artist-friendly, modeller-based, cloth setup tools
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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/