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As we revealed two weeks ago, Havok has unveiled two new products at GDC – Cloth and Destruction – and at the same time has updated its suite of tools to version 5.5.
New modules Havok Cloth and Havok Destruction focus on fabric generation/movement and environmental damage respectively, and feature out-of-the-box integration with Havok Physics and Havok Animation.
Cloth features realistic physically-based simulation of cloth and character clothing with low CPU and memory overhead; is multithreaded and platform-optimised, and is designed as an artist-driven and friendly control of cloth behavioral properties such as stretching, damping and bending.
Destruction, meanwhile, is a tool for simulation of rigid body destruction featuring dynamic fracture of game objects (such as shattering, fracture and deformation) and an SDK that is fully multithreaded, optimised for the PS3 and 360 and makes optimal use of Havok Physics.
“With the release of Havok Cloth and Havok Destruction, the company adds both depth and breadth to our market-dominating suite of physics tools,” said David O’Meara, MD of Havok.
“Innovative and easy to utilize, Havok Cloth and Destruction are powerful, flexible tools giving art teams more control in the design process, resulting in a more realistic interactive experience for gamers.”
The upgrades to the rest of the Havok suite to version 5.5, added O’Meara, "help development teams create enjoyable and realistic games more efficiently".
He added: “Havok 5.5 represents the most innovative version of our suite of products to date, and with it Havok will help drive the next generation of bestsellers and award-winners.”
The popular Havok Physics module’s upgrade to 5.5 boasts better continuous multi-platform physics optimisation as well as enhanced collision query optimisations especially for the PS3. Meanwhile Havok Animation 5.5 delivers improved tools and technology including Spline based compression, export of Float Channels for morph target support, and Multithreading optimizations. Havok said these enhancements "deliver better performance by reducing memory consumption".
Lastly Havok Behavior 5.5 includes an enhanced Behavior SDK and tools which enable more optimization, better Physics workflow, modified visualisation of behavior trees and improved global character positioning and activity transitioning.
