Havok 2025.1 Release Highlights

The Havok 2025.1 release is now available!

This release brings improvements across all products, including continued work to support distributing Havok in source-only form, enhanced visual fidelity of cloth simulation during abrupt animation changes and smooth pathing to create more believable character navigation.

Havok 2025.1 also sees the introduction of an early version of a brand new Havok Visual Debugger.

Common

Nintendo Switch 2 Support

Havok 2025.1 introduces official support for the Nintendo Switch™ 2. All Havok products and features are available on Nintendo Switch 2, with cross-platform determinism fully guaranteed.

Nintendo Switch is a trademark of Nintendo.

New Visual Debugger (VDB)

This release includes an early version of a brand new Havok Visual Debugger, rewritten to handle huge worlds with minimal impact on game performance. It provides richer data and analysis tools to bring a deeper understanding of what is happening within scenes and why.

This new Visual Debugger is currently in ALPHA and is not currently suitable for production but gives a flavor of what to expect as the tool matures over the next Havok versions.

The new Havok Visual Debugger (VDB) available in alpha.

Havok Navigation

Smooth path following

Havok 2025.1 introduces a smooth path follower feature to complement the smooth path solver released in Havok 2023.2. This system enables characters to follow a trajectory calculated by the smooth path solver and adapt to it while automatically handling any deviation from the calculated trajectory, resulting in more natural trajectories and smoothly predicting future trajectory. Smooth path following also helps animation systems such as motion matching to produce more natural output.

Standard steering(left) versus smooth path steering (right).

Support global region pruning with swappable nav meshes

Previously, global region pruning relied on a static world which made it incompatible with swappable nav meshes. Havok 2025.1 adds the utilities required to handle swappable nav meshes within global region pruning. The combination of these two features produces more optimal navigation data by using the best version of the nav mesh at any given time with all disconnected or unreachable faces removed.

Partial support for wall climbing

BETA support for wall climbing pathfinding and path following has been introduced in Havok 2025.1. Characters can now traverse vertical faces using hand-authored nav meshes and a future release will aim to bring nav volume generation for wall climbing to automate the process.

This partial support enables users to build some specific use cases. Please contact Havok support for extended guidance.

Example of characters navigating on the surface of a cave and on the surface of a tree using hand authored navigation data.

Havok Cloth

Skin Sim Cloth Pose

This feature is designed to enhance realism in cinematics by preventing unnatural cloth behavior during abrupt animation changes. Sudden shifts in character poses can introduce unwanted animation velocity into the simulation, resulting in distracting or unrealistic motion that breaks immersion. The new Skin Sim Cloth Pose feature helps smooth those transitions and maintain visual fidelity.

Key Use Cases:

Transfer Motion:
Ideal for fast, continuous movements, whether at the root level (e.g., a character spinning quickly on the spot) or at a local bone level (e.g., a rapid leg kick). It helps eliminate simulation artifacts caused by quick directional changes.
Teleport and Pose Warp:
Handles sudden, discontinuous movements, such as teleporting a character to a new location or snapping to a new pose without blending. This ensures cloth behaves naturally even when the animation jumps.
Sim Pose Skinning for Performance:
When real-time cloth simulation is disabled, such as during LOD transitions or gameplay states like time freeze, the system can fall back to skinning the cloth using a cached simulation pose. This maintains visual consistency while improving performance.

New Skin Sim Cloth Pose feature in Havok Cloth SDK

Large World Support Improvements

The Physics-Cloth bridge, used for collision handling between Havok Cloth and Havok Physics, now respects each cloth instance’s current local-to-world offset during simulation and collision. Previously, it relied on a global offset for the cloth world.

This update eliminates the need to re-register cloth instances when they move across regions with different offsets, significantly improving support for large-scale worlds.

Improved Wind Simulation with Built-in Air Resistance

Wind simulation in the cloth system has been enhanced with built-in air resistance, resulting in more realistic and stable cloth behavior, especially at higher wind speeds.

Previously, the absence of air resistance could lead to exaggerated or implausible cloth motion, such as large oscillations at the ends of longer cloth strips. With this update, air resistance provides natural damping, making fast-moving cloth behave more believably under strong wind forces.

Dark Mode Now Available in Cloth Tools

Havok 2025.1 adds dark mode to both the Cloth Setup Tool and the Preview Tool, delivering a more comfortable and modern user experience, especially in low-light environments.

This update aligns the cloth tools with the rest of the editor’s visual theming and is part of ongoing efforts to improve usability and visual clarity.

Rendering Improvements: Support for Large Render Meshes in Deformation/Skinning

Both mesh deformation and skinning operations on render meshes now support vertex counts exceeding 65,536, removing the previous limitation caused by 16-bit indexing.

This update greatly improves scalability and offers more flexibility when working with high-resolution geometry.

Custom Deform Improvements

Users can now optionally supply a memory buffer to hold the cloth simulation particle positions for upload to GPU, reducing the amount of memory copying needed.

New setup and utilities help with migration from Standard (CPU) Mesh-mesh Deform to Custom (GPU) Mesh-mesh Deform. Example usage is shown in a new demo.

Havok Physics

Compound-Compound Shape Collisions Improvements

Havok 2025.1 introduces significant improvements for compound-compound shape collisions. These changes provide performance benefits and improved user experience.

Settling of piles of objects

A new friction model improves stability of piles of objects, eliminating residual motion that previously could keep bodies moving slowly and preventing deactivation.

This new model helps the performance of destruction scenarios, by allowing piles of debris to become inactive much sooner than in previous versions, while still looking natural and without visual artefacts.

Raycast attenuation utilities

Havok 2025.1 adds a utility to efficiently track how much of a raycast overlaps each hit object, rather than reporting only the hit position. This enables use cases such as attenuating a visibility raycast as it passes through fog volumes or reducing a bullet’s energy as it passes through materials, during a single query. Previously these use cases would have required additional queries.

Unreal Engine Integrations

We continue to update and maintain the Havok for Unreal products and keep pace with all Unreal releases.
Havok support for Unreal 5.6 was released on 14th June, and the 25.1 integration for 5.6 is scheduled for the near future.

If considering a move to Unreal, make sure to reach out to discuss how to get Havok’s robust and battle-tested products in the engine.

Evaluate Now

To see how these features could help superpower your game, or to learning more about any of the Havok products, reach out through the contact page to start an evaluation.