Press release
San Francisco, CA (February 19, 2008): Havok, the premier provider of interactive software and services to digital creators in the games and movie industries, today announced the release of Havok 5.5 at the 2008 Game Developer’s Conference (ES162, West Hall). The latest comprehensive offering from Havok includes enhancements and new features across its award winning modular suite of run-time technology and artists tools, dramatically accelerating the development of cross platform, cutting edge electronic entertainment. Currently, there are over 200 video games on the market featuring Havok’s innovative physics software.Havok 5.5 includes major enhancements to Havok’s core products, Havok Physics, the leading real-time collision detection and physical simulation solution, Havok Animation™, the innovative fast and flexible animation SDK and Tool set, and Havok Behavior, the only system for developing event-driven character behaviors in a game. Together the improvements in Havok 5.5 put new power in the hands of game developers to create a more realistic, immersive gameplay experience.
“With each new product or version of Havok that we release we take time to listen to customer comments and strive to help development teams create enjoyable and realistic games more efficiently,” said David O’Meara, Managing Director of Havok. “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.”
Havok Physics 5.5 provides a new level of continuous multi-platform physics optimization as well as enhanced collision query optimizations especially for the PLAYSTATION 3.
Havok Animation 5.5 delivers developers and artists improved tools and technology including Spline based compression, export of Float Channels for morph target support, and Multithreading optimizations. Together these enhancements deliver better performance by reducing memory consumption, giving the animator full control over compression accuracy compression and providing constant time depression. Havok Animation™ 5.5’s easy to use export, sampling and blending capabilities allows developers to significantly cut content creation times and memory requirements.
Havok Behavior 5.5 brings new power to developers and artists, with another leap forward in interactive character behavior authoring. Building on the first unified authoring environment and SDK that intuitively combines the power of physics with procedural animation and traditional animation assets, Havok Behavior 5.5 includes an enhanced Behavior SDK and tools. These allow further run-time optimizations and more modifiers, improved Physics workflow, modified visualization of behavior trees, improved global character positioning and activity transitioning, as well as other improved asset management features, significantly empowering teams and accelerating production overall.
