Havok 2025.2 Release Highlights
The Havok 2025.2 release is now available!
This release brings improvements across all products, including voxelized proxy-based nav mesh generation, a new mode to cater to variable time steps in cloth simulation and new features to reduce artist overhead when handling high-resolution source meshes.
Havok 2025.2 also sees continued work on the new Havok Visual Debugger, and fixes and stability related improvements across the board.
Common
New Visual Debugger (VDB)
This is the second release of the rearchitected VDB.
It is a ground-up rewrite, with vastly increased performance on capture and playback, especially on large scenes. Notable new features are supporting multiple worlds over a single connection & algorithm debugging for navigation.
This release is Beta. Depending on the feature set you use, it could replace the existing VDB for some or all use cases. If your use case fits into one or more categories listed above, we expect you to see significant improvements in the new VDB.
This release supports Havok Physics and Havok Navigation; Cloth support will be included in a future update.
Havok Navigation
Voxelized, proxy-based nav mesh generation
Havok Navigation now supports two independent code paths for generating a nav mesh.
Alongside the existing face clipping-based code path, proxy-based nav mesh generation builds an intermediate voxel representation of the input geometry and the character shape and then generates nav mesh faces from that representation. The output data structure is unchanged, and this new nav mesh functionality with all existing runtime features.
Proxy-based nav mesh generation provides higher performance when working with detailed, highly tessellated input geometry, and more accurately reflects the capabilities of the physical character proxy. By adjusting the voxel size, you can reduce precision to increase speed, for use cases such as runtime regeneration and interactive in-editor updates.
Havok Cloth
Time-Stepping
Havok Cloth can now run at a wide range of time-steps with highly consistent behaviour. This new mode ensures smooth, predictable simulation even when frame timing changes significantly, making it ideal for variable frame rates and slow-motion scenarios.
The technique works by stepping simulate operators uniformly at the cloth asset’s tuned base time-step, then interpolating results for shorter steps and sub-stepping for longer ones. This approach avoids the changes in behaviour that result from other methods that rely on constraint stiffness adjustment to compensate for varying time-steps.
CPU Skinning and Mesh Deformation
The latest release also introduces a new sequential object-space deformer that removes the previous eight-influence-per-vertex limit, enabling more accurate and flexible cloth deformation for complex meshes and advanced skinning setups. This update also brings full support for dual quaternion skinning within the object-space skin operator, eliminating legacy constraints such as low weight precision and limited influence counts. Combined with the removal of static display buffers in the Cloth Setup Tool, these changes simplify workflows and reduce setup time for artists.
Performance has been significantly improved, with the new sequential mesh-mesh deformer up to 2.4 times faster compared to legacy implementations. Benefits include smoother, more consistent deformation, faster iteration, and improved runtime efficiency across platforms.
Havok Content Tools
Portable HCT
HCT is now available as a self-contained portable ZIP, allowing multiple versions to coexist on the same machine. This approach eliminates conflicts caused by shared DLLs and the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) and simplifies plugin deployment for 3ds Max and Maya. Artists and developers can switch between versions without uninstalling or disrupting existing pipelines.
Additional Improvements:
- Havok Filter Manager now runs in a separate process, improving overall stability.
- Modeler sample files are delivered in a separate ZIP, reducing the size of the main package.
Havok Physics
Large World Coordinates
Physics worlds now support even larger world coordinates, increasing the maximum supported size for a stable simulation and queries is from 100km to 1000km. By selectively applying higher precision only where it matters most, rather than switching everything to double precision, we do this without sacrificing performance.
Collision Shapes
We continue to reduce artist overheads with two new features in this version to help with handling of high-resolution source meshes:
- The LOD collision shape has been extended to include an optional “auto” LOD shape – this automatically produces several lower resolution versions of the selected input mesh, and at runtime dynamically selects an appropriate detail for each collision pair based on the accuracy requirements of that pair.
For example, below: when large objects collide with this auto LOD landscape coarse (blue) triangles are automatically selected, while when small objects collide with it finer (red) triangles are selected. This means CPU cost is predictable regardless of object size.
- The convex decomposition pipeline has been extended to not only decompose the input mesh but now also looks for repeating features and additional simplification opportunities, resulting in simpler and more memory efficient results while still respecting the artist criteria.
For example, below: by identifying reusable pieces of the decomposed collision geometry (those sharing the same color in this image), the memory size of this asset is reduced by half:
Particle Systems
Performance and stability for stacking and piling large numbers of Havok Physics particles have been improved. This includes reducing jittering artifacts of particles in contact with other particles and rigid bodies, adding a (beta) convex collision option for particle-vs-particle collisions, and allowing more user control over behavior of particle-vs-particle and particle-vs-rigid body collisions via modifier callbacks.
Unreal Engine Integrations
We continue to update and maintain the Havok for Unreal products and keep pace with all Unreal releases.
Initial Havok support for Unreal 5.7 was released on 28th November, and the 25.2 integration for 5.7 was released on 16th December.
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.
