Havok at GDC 2026

GDC 2026 is right around the corner, and our meeting schedule is already filling up fast.

This year, we’re especially excited to connect with ambitious teams pushing the limits of what’s possible in Unreal Engine.

Havok for Unreal delivers drop‑in Physics, Navigation, and Cloth solutions powered by the same Havok SDKs that have shipped in hundreds of AAA titles.

One of the biggest advantages: Havok maintains the full integration inside Unreal Engine so your team doesn’t have to. You get cutting‑edge simulation, consistent updates, and production‑ready stability without the engineering overhead.

If you’re exploring ways to elevate gameplay, streamline performance, or reduce technical risk in UE5, we’d love to show you what we’ve been building.

Reach out now to lock in time with the Havok team at GDC.

Havok Navigation Principal Engineer Ben Sunshine-Hill will be giving a session on best practices for AAA performance and robustness. Ben has presented at GDC many times over the years, making complex theories accessible and empowering you to apply them to any game.

Session Details

Description

We will comprehensively describe best-practice technologies and techniques for navigation and related character behavior tasks. After touching briefly on the basic algorithms and data structures, such as A* and nav meshes, we will move to character- and use case-specific concerns: vehicles, climbing, flying, parkour-ing, and large swarms and groups. We will describe the interactions between pathfinding, path following, character animation, and character physics, and how to ensure that each system supports the others. We will also cover methods for dealing with large and dynamically changing worlds, and on non-navigation queries which support NPC AI. The focus will be on well-tested industry-standard methods which are performant and robust.

Link: https://schedule.gdconf.com/session/best-practices-for-character-navigation-architecting-for-aaa-performance-and-robustness/917673