Presentations and Sessions

Recording: Pending

Slides: PDF , PPTX

Presenter: Richard Kogelnig

Event: Ai and Games Conference 2025

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.

Recording: YouTube

Presenter: Steve Ewart

Event: Develop: Brighton 2025

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.

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, and dealing with compiler bugs, learn practical tips to implement cross-platform determinism in your game.

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

Presenter: Ben Sunshine-Hill

Event: GDC 2025

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.

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

Presenter: Igor Chiang

Event: GDC 2025

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.

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

Event: GDC 2025

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.

Recording: GDC Vault – Lessons in Integrating Third-Party Technology into Unreal Engine 5 (Presented by Havok)

Presenter: Marcel Bohnenberger, Oliver Strunk

Event: GDC 2024

About the talk
Havok technology has been integrated with a broad set of proprietary engines. In this talk we want to share our learnings from integrating the Havok SDKs into Unreal Engine. We show how we approached the integrations of the three Havok SDKs – Havok Navigation, Havok Cloth and Havok Physics – unlocking Havok’s industry renowned performance and rich feature set within Unreal. Join this session to learn how to integrate and maintain your own existing tech within Unreal or see how Havok can work for you.

Recording: The Evolution Of Physics Within Games – Havok at Develop:Brighton

Presenter: Steve Ewart

Event: Develop:Brighton 2024

About the talk
How we think of physics in games has changed hugely over the years. From basic representations to complex dynamic geometry, physics simulation is a core element that allows games to become bigger, better and more interactive. Steve Ewart from the Field Application Engineering team at Havok gave this talk at Develop:Brighton 2024 detailing the changes to how we view, use, and think, about physics in games.