Presentations and Sessions

GDC 2026

Recording: Pending

Presenter: Ben Sunshine-Hill

About the talk

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.

Takeaway

Attendees will gain broad knowledge of how the most effective and accomplished game development teams today tackle character navigation, and of how to achieve the best results while maintaining performance and reliability when moving beyond basic use cases into more exotic character capabilities and behaviors.

Relevant to: Havok Navigation, Havok Navigation for Unreal, Havok Physics, Havok Physics for Unreal

AI and Games Conference 2025

Recording: Pending

Presenter: Richard Kogelnig

About the talk
Debugging complex algorithms can be difficult, especially for complex AI behaviours which can be executed over several frames or asynchronously is a nightmare. But doing this across all major gaming platforms? That’s a unique horror for AAA game developers. At Havok we have fought this battle for years, and we’re here to introduce you to our weapon of choice: Cross-Platform Determinism. Determinism allows us to relive crash scenarios as often as we want across platforms. A bug found on a console can be replayed on PC in debug. Saving time, reducing frustration, and simplifying debugging. Saying development is now a dream might be pushing it a bit too far, but only a bit!

In this talk you will learn how determinism, and in particular cross-platform determinism, can help game developers implement better tooling for recording player sessions and reproducing issues. From running fast math operations on different CPU architectures, to managing deterministic multi-threading models, learn practical tips to implement cross-platform determinism in your game.

Relevant to: Havok Physics, Havok Navigation, Havok Cloth

Develop: Brighton 2025

Recording: YouTube

Presenter: Steve Ewart

About the Talk

Our game graphics have reached a level where differentiation may come, if not from style, then by pulling from other representations of the world. Aside from the graphical, the audible, navigable, and physical representations of the game are unique; each needing to be described, queried, and updated independently. They also need to work in an efficient pipeline, ultimately complementing each other.
Given the complexity that may arise from communication within and between the many representations of the game world, we need tools to help interpret the data flow without requiring domain expertise.

This session walks through the creation, maintenance, and analysis of these representations through the optics of the Havok SDKs and tools, with the aim of enhancing the interaction and immersion in a final cohesive game world.

Session Takeaway

• Understand how different representations of the game world can be generated from the graphical representation automatically.
• Learn about approaches to keeping the different representations correlated and communicating efficiently with each other.
• Get an overview of the visual tools needed to allow anyone to interpret & analyse non-graphical representations of the world.

Relevant to: Havok Physics, Havok Navigation, Havok Cloth, Havok Physics for Unreal, Havok Navigation for Unreal, Havok Cloth for Unreal

CEDEC 2025

Recording: YouTube

Presenter: Yosuke Katsura, Creek & River

About the Talk

A look at how Creek & River used Havok Cloth to enable highly detailed cloth simulation on characters.

This session is in Japanese.

Relevant to: Havok Cloth, Havok Cloth for Unreal

CEDEC 2025

Recording: YouTube

Presenter: Tadahiro Manmoto

About the Talk

An overview of the Havok Products including latest features and improvements for Physics, Navigation and Cloth, and the Havok for Unreal integrations.

This session is in Japanese.

Relevant to: Havok Physics, Havok Navigation, Havok Cloth, Havok Physics for Unreal, Havok Navigation for Unreal, Havok Cloth for Unreal

GDC 2025

Recording: GDC Vault – The Discovery of the Perfect NavMesh (vault access required)

Presenter: Ben Sunshine-Hill

About the Talk

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.

Relevant to: Havok Physics, Havok Navigation, Havok Physics for Unreal, Havok Navigation for Unreal,

GDC 2025

Recording: GDC Vault – Visual Effects Summit: Redefining Physical VFX Systems (vault access required)

Presenter: Igor Chiang

About the Talk

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.

Relevant to: Havok Physics, Havok Physics for Unreal

GDC 2025

Recording: GDC Vault – Game AI Summit: Navigating Expansive Worlds: Implementing Custom Large World Support in Unreal  (vault access required)

Slides: GDC Vault – Game AI Summit: Navigating Expansive Worlds: Implementing Custom Large World Support in Unreal

Presenter: Richard Kogelnig

About the Talk

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.

Relevant to: Havok Navigation, Havok Navigation for Unreal