Game Developers Conference(GDC) 2025
GDC is at the core of our calendar, and we’ll be returning this year to give an update on recent changes, demonstrate new features, and offer a glimpse into the future of Havok technology.
All Havok products – Havok Navigation, Havok Cloth, and Havok Physics – continue to empower game developers to super-power their games through richer and more dynamic worlds while maintaining great performance on every major gaming platform.
GDC is an opportunity to talk to us directly and learn how Havok could help your project. This year we’ll be presenting a selection of recent and upcoming pillar features for Havok Navigation, Havok Cloth, and Havok Physics, and we’re particularly excited to show off our Havok for Unreal offerings, making it easier than ever to use Havok in the Unreal Engine.
If you’re interested in talking through what Havok could do for your game at GDC’25, reach out to us as soon as you can, while we have some meeting slots available.
On top of our usual plans, this year 3 Havok engineers will be holding sessions at GDC: one at the main conference, one at the VFX summit, and one at the AI summit. Make sure to check out the sessions to learn more about the technological advances and new innovations from across the Havok team.
The Discovery of the Perfect Nav Mesh
Main Conference
Session link – The Discovery of the Perfect Nav Mesh | 2025 Schedule | Game Developers Conference (GDC)
Presented by Ben Sunshine Hill
Tech Lead, Havok Navigation
Is there even such a thing as a “perfect” nav mesh? What would be the point of having one? And why is your AI so bad at navigating on cave walls and rope bridges? In this session, Ben Sunshine-Hill pulls back the curtain on more than a decade of evolution in AAA navigation systems, describes the hidden link between navigation and physics, and shows how off-the-shelf geometry processing libraries can be used to generate navigation data you can actually rely on.
Takeaway
Attendees will be inculcated into the deep truths of navigation datasets and will thereby gain uncanny powers over them. Forever changed by these revelations, they will understand the imperfections of their nav mesh generators, how to work around them, and how to overcome them.
Intended Audience
Gameplay systems programmers, particularly in AI and animation, will benefit from this talk. A basic knowledge of computational geometry (such as convex hulls and union operations on shapes) will be helpful but not necessary. This talk contains no math equations.
Visual Effects Summit: Redefining Physical VFX Systems
VFX Summit
Session link – Visual Effects Summit: Redefining Physical VFX Systems | 2025 Schedule | Game Developers Conference (GDC)
Presented by Igor Chiang
Senior Developer Relationship Engineer, Havok
In the early stage of game design, it is important to identify which elements belong to VFX, and which are part of the rigid body system and can interact with gameplay. This distinction determines the flexibility of gameplay, interactivity, and artistic feel.
In this session, the contiguous spectrum between these two systems to unlock more gameplay options for designers and show how this understanding can enhance existing frameworks is explored. He will introduce a system that bridges VFX system and rigid body system, a system that supports team ASOBI in achieving unprecedentedly dynamic, interactive, and immersive gameplay with their latest Astro Bot game.
Takeaway
The audience will be inspired to utilize a system which combines performance of a VFX system and fidelity of a rigid body system and realize additional levels of immersive and interactive gameplay.
Intended Audience
This lecture is intended for designers and developers working with the VFX system or the physics system.
Navigating Expansive Worlds: Implementing Custom Large World Support in Unreal
AI Summit
Session link: Game AI Summit: Navigating Expansive Worlds: Implementing Custom Large World Support in Unreal | 2025 Schedule | Game Developers Conference (GDC)
Presented by Richard Kogelnig
Principal Software Engineer, Havok Navigation
Massive worlds cause massive problems for NPC navigation. Pathfinding across large complex spaces can cause unwanted in-game stutters or blow memory budgets, while recreating navigation data and manually placing traversal annotations (such as jumps, vaults, and climbs) grinds iterating on content to a halt.
In this session, learn how Havok streamlined the creation of navigation data for massive worlds in Unreal Engine. Richard Kogelnig covers the tools and techniques used to get the most out of developer iteration time and runtime navigation performance. The talk goes into detail on how advanced navigation features, like traversal analysis, cluster graphs, and global region pruning, were integrated on top of Unreal Engine’s suite of Editor tools.
Takeaway
Attendees will gain insight into techniques for efficient NPC navigation in expansive game environments and learn the common pitfalls to avoid. They will also discover how to structure a world partition-based solution in Unreal Engine and adapt editor workflows to optimize development processes
Intended Audience
This talk is for performance conscious game AI developers who work on projects involving NPCs navigating large worlds in and outside of Unreal. As well as developers who are interested in approaches to extending Unreal Engine with custom solutions.
Our speakers will try to take time after the sessions to answer questions but if these topics have sparked your interest in Havok technology, consider scheduling a meeting with the Havok team for an in-depth discussion of what we can do for your game.
If you can’t make a GDC slot, we can schedule a remote meeting after the show to discuss the Havok products in depth and see if they’re the right fit for your project.
Reach out through the contact page to get started.
