Kotaku: dev tools

Havok Goes Free In May

Mike Fahey — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:40:10 MST

Trying to create your own PC game of you and your friends shooting up your high school but lacking the physics and animation technology to bring the whole project together? Well if you can wait a few months, you can use the same tools you've seen flashed countless times on your TV and computer monitor over the past several years - Havok. Havok is releasing their industry-leading Havok Complete toolset completely free in May. Havok Complete combines the Havok physics engine with Havok Animation, and is already used in over 200 triple-A titles on the market today.

"This is fantastic news for commercial PC game developers as well as the independent game development community, who will really benefit from this move," said Mark DeLoura, creator of the Game Programming Gems series.

Indeed fantastic news, as having powerful tools freely available can really help foster creativity across the industry, while also expanding the market for Havok's add-on products, like the recently announced Cloth and Destruction apps. An extremely long press release follows.

Havok Offers Core Physics Software Free For PC Game Developers
Company Seeks to Propel Innovative Game Development by Giving Free Access to Industry-Leading Physics and Animation Tool Suite

San Francisco (February 20, 2008) - Havok™, the premier provider of interactive software and services to digital creators in the games and movie industries, today announced that the company will offer the PC version of its award-winning physics and animation software product - Havok Complete - for download free of charge.

Available for non-commercial use, Havok Complete for the PC will be freely downloadable in May 2008.

Havok's core platform, Havok Complete combines the industry-leading Havok Physics engine and Havok Animation, the company's premier character animation solution. Havok Complete is already the most popular solution in the cross-platform AAA games market, featuring technology used in over 200 games. By making Havok Complete for the PC freely downloadable, Havok will further build on its leading position by completely removing the barriers to entry for the large number of independent developers, academic institutions and enthusiasts in the PC space.

"Havok has an excellent revenue base generated by sales of our three products across multiple platforms and into multiple industries," said David O'Meara, Managing Director at Havok. "This enables us to make an industry-changing move and opens up a much broader market for products such as Havok Behavior - and our new products Havok Cloth and Havok Destruction - that really come alive when adopted on top of our core platform, Havok Complete."

Havok has entered into an agreement with Intel, Havok's parent company, under which approved game developers on the PC platform can execute a commercial distribution license with Havok for free.

"Intel is very pleased to be sponsoring this direction in the PC market. This aligns well with our ongoing strategy of putting the best software tools in the hands of PC games developers," said Renee J. James, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Software and Solutions Group, Intel Corporation.

With the free PC download of Havok Complete, Havok enables broad non-commercial development use for artists and engineers around the world, which Havok believes will boost creative game development throughout the industry.

"This is fantastic news for commercial PC game developers as well as the independent game development community, who will really benefit from this move," said Mark DeLoura, creator of the Game Programming Gems series. "It's great to see a leading middleware company like Havok show such support for PC game developers by making its physics and animation system freely available."

Havok's overall focus remains cross-platform and Havok will continue commercial licensing of Havok Complete for other platforms and in other industries such as movies and serious gaming. This initiative does not apply to license fees that may be payable to Havok for console versions of Havok Complete or to applications developed for other purposes such as game engines for redistribution, other middleware, movies, training, military or industrial simulation.

Havok's physics software is featured in over 200 AAA games available on stores shelves today. With well over 90 games currently in development to be released this year, use of Havok's ubiquitous software is up 100% over last year at the same time. Best-selling titles featuring Havok physics include: Halo 3, Assassin's Creed, Guitar Hero III, BioShock, World in Conflict, Half Life 2: The Orange Box, and Heavenly Sword. Havok's software will also be featured in the highly-anticipated upcoming games Alan Wake, Indiana Jones, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Starcraft II.

With a broad and deep range of tech partners including AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft as well as a host of world-class publishers and developers, Havok is well known industry-wide for its excellent customer service.

In addition to the PC software download, Havok also unveiled two new software products, Havok Cloth™ and Havok Destruction™ at this year's Game Developers Conference. Havok Cloth and Destruction provide artists with dramatically increased control over interactive cloth and destructible objects within games. The company also announced several new features and enhancements across its award winning modular suite of run-time technology and artist tools.

Havok also celebrated a number of key entertainment and technology awards in 2007, including a National Academy of Television, Arts & Sciences Award, Game Developer Frontline Award, and a Develop Industry Excellence Award.

Havok Gets Cracking, Fluttering

Mike Fahey — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:00:08 MST

The Havok engine just got a much-needed kick in the fluttering cloth pants with the unveiling of Havok Cloth and Havok Destruction at GDC, two products that will provide developers unprecedented control over cloth and destruction in their games. Havok Cloth, as seen in the video above, allows for scalable clothing that will stretch and flow as a character moves, while Havok Destruction is all about breaking stuff - dynamic fracturing, shattering, and deformation of objects. While just a nifty video clip to the layman, this is exactly the sort of thing that gives game developers - male and female alike - intense, uncomfortable erections. Hit the jump for the full press release.

Havok Gives Artists Unprecendented Control With Introduction of Cloth and Destruction
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 19 /PRNewswire/ — Havok(TM), the premier provider of interactive software and services to digital creators in the games and movie industries, today unveiled Havok Cloth(TM) and Havok Destruction(TM) at the 2008 Game Developers Conference (ES162, West Hall). Available for the first time in mid-2008, these two products provide artists with dramatically increased control over interactive cloth and destructible objects within games.

Built on Havok's award-winning modular suite of run-time technology and artists tools, Havok Cloth(TM) and Havok Destruction(TM) will feature out-of-the-box integration with Havok Physics(TM) and Havok Animation(TM), dramatically accelerating the development of cross platform, cutting edge electronic entertainment across all leading game platforms.

"With the release of Havok Cloth and Havok Destruction, the company adds both depth and breadth to our market-dominating suite of physics tools," said David O'Meara, Managing Director of Havok. "Innovative and easy to utilize, Havok Cloth and Destruction are powerful, flexible tools giving art teams more control in the design process, resulting in a more realistic interactive experience for gamers."

David Coghlan, Vice President of Development for Havok said, "Havok Cloth and Havok Destruction will further increase the standard of realism and immersion in games. Havok Cloth enables scalable clothing that will significantly enhance the visual impact of on-screen characters. Havok Destruction will drive high-adrenaline action scenes with unprecedented levels of physics mayhem."

Havok Cloth(TM) is a new performance-optimized development tool designed to minimize the time that game artists spend on animating the behavior of character garments and environmental cloth. It enables increased realism for cutting-edge games, is easily customizable and fits into today's workflow without burdening artists, animators or programmers.

Havok Cloth(TM) features:
— Highly realistic physically-based simulation of cloth and character
clothing with low CPU and memory overhead
— Multithreaded and platform-optimized (including PLAYSTATION(R)3)
— Artist-driven control of the full range of cloth behavioral properties
such as stretching, damping and bending
— Artist-friendly, modeller-based, cloth setup tools

Havok Destruction(TM) is the cross-platform tool for simulation of rigid body destruction. Destruction gives the game artist total control over the simulation, drastically reducing the production time and cost of creating large numbers of realistic destructible game objects. Havok Destruction can create a completely new game play experience by giving additional realism to structural mechanics, graphical effects and game level design.

Havok Destruction(TM) features:
— Dynamic fracture of game objects including: shattering, fracture and
deformation.
— Software Development Kit that is fully multithreaded, optimized for
the PLAYSTATION(R)3 and Xbox 360(R) and makes optimal use of Havok
Physics
— Art Tool Support

AcroGames Licenses Unreal Engine 3

Mike Fahey — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:40:07 MST

The only thing that surprises me about Unreal Engine 3 license announcements anymore is that everyone doesn't already have one. Now Korean developer AcroGames has licensed the engine from Epic, and thanks to some digging done over at Gamasutra, we know they are working on an online PC title. AcroGames is an amalgam of talent that have worked on both NCsoft's Lineage II and Softmax's Magna Carta RPG for the PlayStation 2, so it really could have gone either way.

Said Epic vice president Jay Wilbur, "AcroGames is a promising team comprised of top talent and we look forward to working with them. We are committed to supporting the Asian game market with best of breed development tools, and our agreement with AcroGames marks a significant achievement in this effort."

Aside from the engine they are using and the platform the game will be appearing on, all we know is that with those two titles under their collective belts we can expect some very pretty androgynous characters to be making an appearance, more than likely in little to no clothing.

AcroGames Licenses Unreal Engine 3 For Online PC Title [Gamasutra]

Cryptic Animation Rig For Everybody!

Mike Fahey — Thu, 10 May 2007 14:20:11 MDT

Hey, high school kids! Having trouble working on the animations for your latest first person shooter video game? Anyone can map their favorite learning institution into a game level, but to create realistic animations, you need tools, and now Cryptic Studios is giving you those tools, free. In an extremely kick ass move on their part, the creators of City of Heroes and developers of the upcoming Marvel Universe Online game have released their Cryptic Animation Rig for download under the GNU General Public License. Not a demo, and not a crappy Lite version, these are the actual production tools used by the studio itself.

"Our goal is to foster a community of animators by providing them the power to generate animations without having to worry about supporting a toolset. Since we were already developing the rig for our core technology team, we decided to release it to the public under the GNU GPL," said Shayne Herrera, Art Development Director for Cryptic Studios. "We feel that the development and gaming communities will benefit greatly from a professional tool like the Cryptic AR."

Unbelievably cool move. Cryptic is even creating forums on the website to foster a community of animators that can support each other and exchange ideas. Cryptic AR 1.0 can be downloaded right here, right now. Michael Fahey

CRYPTIC STUDIOS RELEASES CRYPTIC ANIMATION RIG

Free Cryptic Animation Rig Now Available Under the GNU General Public License

LOS GATOS, CA - May 11, 2007 - Cryptic Studios, Inc., an independent developer of massively multiplayer online games, announced today its proprietary Cryptic Animation Rig (Cryptic AR) is now available free for download under the GNU General Public License.

"Our goal is to foster a community of animators by providing them the power to generate animations without having to worry about supporting a toolset. Since we were already developing the rig for our core technology team, we decided to release it to the public under the GNU GPL," said Shayne Herrera, Art Development Director for Cryptic Studios. "We feel that the development and gaming communities will benefit greatly from a professional tool like the Cryptic AR."

Cryptic AR allows animators of all experience levels to familiarize themselves with the same tools used in a professional development environment. Unlike other free animation rigs, Cryptic AR is not an approximation of production tools, but the very tools currently being used to produce next-gen game visuals at Cryptic Studios.

"We decided to add the ability to switch and create character skins called 'IDs,' or 'identities,'" said Sean Burgoon, animator and creator of the Cryptic AR. "Cryptic AR version 1.0 ships with three IDs and we plan to release more on a regular basis. We are encouraging user-submitted IDs through the animation community we are creating on our web site."

The Cryptic AR web site will also have forums to serve as the community home for aspiring AR animators. The forums will act as a place to inspire continued creativity in users and support animation needs.

Cryptic AR version 1.0 is now available for download at www.crypticar.com.