Gamers are constantly looking for the next hot playing experience. Game developers feed this hunger by perfecting game realism, animation, and interactivity. This frequently includes optimizing their newest games for the latest game-playing platforms. To keep raising the bar, many top game developers and publishers use products from Havok, one of the gaming industry's leading independent providers of physics and character animation middleware. Its leading physics engine is one of the most widely used technologies for developing state-of-the-art games such as F.E.A.R*, Half Life 2*, Age of Empires III*, Company of Heroes*, Max Payne 2*, Destroy All Humans 2*, Over the Hedge*, Auto Assault*, and Oblivion*. Havok’s dedication to continuously innovating, enhancing, and optimizing its technology for new platforms has made it a first-choice for renowned publishers like Sony, Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, and Activision.

BREAKING DOWN THE BARRIERS TO IMMERSIVE GAMEPLAY

To be competitive, today’s game worlds require realistic animations, authentic behaviors, and highly believable characters. Accomplishing such realism requires superior gameplay physics simulations. Gameplay physics affects how a game is played from moment-to-moment, and is generally computed on a computer’s processor. Physical changes that you cause in the game or that happen to you or around you—like knocking over a box, and then climbing up on it—change what you may want to do in each instant of gameplay. To maintain the realism, all these changes have to occur smoothly with no detectible latency. For this to happen, the close proximity between physics, game logic, and memory generally demands that these systems execute together on a computer’s processor.

A limiting factor in the past was hardware power. This is rapidly changing with the advent of multi-core processors. Combined with graphics processing unit (GPU) graphics, multi-core processor architectures have the potential to enable fully simulated game characters and their moment-to-moment actions in completely interactive and destructible 3-D worlds. Havok has introduced HydraCore* technology in its physics system and other products to take advantage of these architectures now and in the future.

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