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 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

Havok Cloth

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/

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.