San Francisco, CA (September 16, 2008) - Havok today announced the release of Havok 6.0, its most broad suite of games middleware components to date, increasing its portfolio of software to five products. The addition of Havok Cloth™ and Havok Destruction™ to the award winning Havok Physics™, Havok Behavior™ and Havok Animation™ products represents a substantial widening of the Havok product offering. Each product forms part of an integrated suite of runtime SDKs and tools, representing the most comprehensive set of cross-platform modular tools available today, enabling game studios to deliver more compelling gameplay, character interaction and physical effects in less time.
“This significant expansion of our product portfolio underlines Havok’s commitment to focus on building modular software solutions that address the key challenges facing games developers, without pushing a hardware agenda or demanding adoption of a monolithic system,” said David O’Meara, Managing Director of Havok. “Our philosophy is to empower the entire development team so every person involved in the process can work more effectively to create the most visually stunning entertainment possible.”
Havok Cloth™ is a new platform-optimized runtime and toolset that dramatically increases the realism of game characters and environments. It allows character designers to go beyond simplistic tight-fitting or hand-animated clothing and to add realistic, physically-based motion to garments like skirts, capes, shirts, trousers and coats, as well other deformable items like hair, bellies or tails. Environmental objects like flags, banners, curtains and vegetation can also be deformed by Havok Cloth. A powerful and flexible tool chain when integrated with the most popular 3d modeling packages, Havok Cloth gives artists full control over cloth behavior using standard polygon modeling and vertex painting tools. Havok Destruction™ delivers art tools and run-time technology that enables unprecedented destruction and deformation of environments and game objects on today’s leading game consoles. It provides a unique highly optimized runtime, which enables brittle fracture, deformation, and structural integrity analysis, with a SDK and puts full control of all destruction effects into the hands of the game developer. The Havok Destruction™ art tools pipeline enables artists and designers to create tune-all destructible objects quickly and efficiently, dramatically reducing the time needed to add breakable assets to games. Havok Behavior™, which couples an intuitive composition tool for artists and designers with a run-time software development kit (SDK) for game programmers, helps teams develop sophisticated character behaviors more quickly and with more creative control than ever before. Havok Behavior 6.0 enables game characters to dynamically sense and interact with other objects and characters in the game. The Behavior Tool has undergone significant UI enhancements to support customized layouts and accelerated workflow, including a new node-tree viewing tool, copy/paste, multi-editing capabilities, and diagnostic “ghosting” features.
Havok 6.0 also includes upgrades to Havok Physics, the leading real-time collision detection and physical simulation solution, including many new optimizations and usability improvements. Havok Animation 6.0 improves run-time performance for multi-core platforms, enhances run-time mirroring and LOD features to save memory, and also provides automatic detection of foot-ground contact in character animations to help inform AI and behavioral actions in the game.
All Havok 6.0 products provide direct support for Autodesk 3ds Max, Maya, and Softimage XSI, are optimized for PC and major game consoles, and may be combined individually or integrated out-of-the-box as a broad suite of tools and run-time components. Havok 6.0 products are also backed by Havok’s world-wide industry-leading support and professional services team.
About Havok Havok, an Intel company, was founded in Dublin, Ireland in 1998, and is the premier provider of interactive software and services for digital media creators in the games and movie industries.
Havok works in partnership with the world’s best known game developers, including: Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft and Pandemic Studios. Havok’s cross-platform, professionally supported technology is available for the Xbox360™, PLAYSTATION®3, PlayStation®2, PSP™, Wii™, and the PC. Havok’s combination of superior technology and dedication to delivering for its customers has led to the company’s technology being used in more than 150 of the world’s best known game titles, including: BioShock, Halo 3, MotorStorm, Stranglehold, Crackdown and Age of Empires III. Havok products have been used to drive special effects in movies such as Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix, 10,000 BC, Poseidon, The Matrix, Troy, Kingdom of Heaven and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Havok has offices in Dublin, San Francisco, San Antonio, Calcutta, Munich, and Tokyo. For more information on Havok, visit www.havok.com.
US Media inquiries please contact: Double Forte for Havok Michelle Curran; Susan Kramer 415/848-8120; 415/848-8113
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