Havok 5 physics solution launched

Havok 5 offers major enhancements in its core products, Havok Physics and Havok Animation, as well as introducing significant new features for Havok Behavior, the system for developing event-driven character behaviors in a game.

Havok Physics 5 provides significant memory and CPU performance improvements that can dramatically accelerate interactive destruction sequences in games. This release also provides enhanced memory limiting and reporting across all platforms, and adds Wii support for Havok’s innovative Visual Debugger, strengthening Havok’s comprehensive offering of cross-platform performance diagnostic tools.

Havok Animation 5 establishes an industry-first with its new run-time mirroring feature, allowing character animations to be reflected interactively from left to right – cutting content creation and memory requirements in half for directional animation assets. This release also provides compression enhancements that reduce the memory required to store arbitrary character animations by as much as 25% over previous releases.

Havok Behavior 5 takes interactive character behavior authoring to a new level, by establishing the first unified authoring environment and SDK that intuitively combines the power of physics with procedural animation and traditional animation assets. The power and utility of this unique system empowers game developers and artists alike, accelerating production 10-fold, and opening the door to hybrid character performances that have never been seen before.