“Havok physics engines allow game developers to realistically depict motion and the effects the game character has on their environment. Havok technology communicates with physical elements in the game and loads them with intelligence, allowing them to react to the players’ actions in a realistic way. Of course, anyone who has used the Wii will recognise how important accurate movement is for the players’ enjoyment of the game. Fans of Carnival Games: Mini- Golf won’t be disappointed with the final results!”

He had me until the "Fans of Carnival Games: Mini- Golf" bit.

Havok signs licensing agreement with game developer 2K Games

Deal means Havok Physics will be used to bring realistic motion to several WiiTM titles from 2K

Havok, the leading provider of physics engines to the global game and movie entertainment industry, has agreed to a licensing agreement with California based game developer 2K Games. Under the terms of the deal, 2K Games will use Havok’s pioneering physics engines to develop several upcoming titles which will be available on the Wii home video game system from Nintendo.

2K will initially use the industry leading Havok Physics engine to support its standards of realism and interactivity in Carnival Games: Mini-Golf™, the sequel to the popular Wii title Carnival Games™, which has sold over 1.5 million units worldwide since its release last year. Havok technology will also be used in other yet-to-be-named titles for the Wii from 2K.

David O’Meara, Managing Director of Havok, explains how Havok’s physic engines will improve interactivity in the hotly anticipated Carnival Games: Mini-Golf title.

“Havok physics engines allow game developers to realistically depict motion and the effects the game character has on their environment. Havok technology communicates with physical elements in the game and loads them with intelligence, allowing them to react to the players’ actions in a realistic way. Of course, anyone who has used the Wii will recognise how important accurate movement is for the players’ enjoyment of the game. Fans of Carnival Games: Mini- Golf won’t be disappointed with the final results!”

Havok’s physics software is featured in over 200 triple A games available on store shelves today. With well over 90 games currently in development for release this year, use of Havok’s ubiquitous software is up 100% for the same period last year. 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.

Blockbuster movies which have employed Havok technology to drive special effects include Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 10000 BC, X-Men: The Last Stand, Poseidon, The Matrix, Troy, Kingdom of Heaven and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

At a glittering ceremony in Las Vegas earlier this year, Havok was honored with an award from the National Academy of Television, Arts & Sciences for their work on their pioneering physics engines which makes games more realistic than ever before. The company uses a combination of next generation physics, animation and tools to reach new standards of realism and interactivity in gaming technology and essentially turn their customers’ creative aspirations into technical realities

"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.

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 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

This year's Game Developers Conference page just updated with a slew of new information including the floorplans for the new show. Is it just me or is it starting to look more and more like E3? This could be in part driven by Microsoft's continued commitment to the show. This year their meeting room and suite space looks to be more than twice the size of Nintendo's and Sony's combined. Epic's is also insanely large, though they have a lot of sales to do for their engine, so I can see them going big at GDC.

Two more maps on the jump.

Intel To Acquire Havok

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 14, 2007 Intel Corporation today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Havok Inc., the leading provider of interactive software and services used by digital media creators in the game and movie industries. Havok will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel.

The acquisition will enable developers in the digital animation and game communities to take advantage of Intel's innovation and technology leadership in the creation of digital media.

"Havok is a proven leader in physics technology for gaming and digital content, and will become a key element of Intel's visual computing and graphics efforts," said Renee J. James, vice president and general manager of Intel's Software and Solutions Group. "Havok will operate its business as usual, which will allow them to continue developing products that are offered across all platforms in the industry."

Havok's modular suite of software development tools is used by game and digital animation creators to build realistic video games for all types of hardware and digitally animated movies. The company's combination of superior technology and dedication to customers has led to its technology being used in more than 150 of the world's best-known game titles, including "BioShock," "Stranglehold," "Halo 2," "Half Life 2," "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion," "Crackdown," "Lost Planet: Extreme Condition," "MotorStorm" and "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." In addition, Havok products have been used to create special effects in movies such as "Poseidon," "The Matrix," "Troy," "Kingdom of Heaven" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

"This is a great fit for Havok products, customers and employees," said Havok CEO David O'Meara. "Intel's scale of technology investment and customer reach enable Havok with opportunities to grow more quickly into new market segments with new products than we could have done organically. We believe the winning combination is Havok's technology and customer know-how with Intel's scale. I am excited to be part of this next phase of Havok's growth."

Havok was founded in 1998 in Dublin, Ireland, and has offices in San Francisco, San Antonio, Stockholm, Calcutta, Munich and Tokyo. The company will be a wholly owned Intel subsidiary and continue to operate as an independent business working with its customers in developing digital media content. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

In a press release that went out yesterday, only to be instantly smothered in a sea of Wii, Havok announced that Blizzard Entertainment has licensed the physics engine for god knows what.

Interestingly, Apple is mentioned specifically:

Jeff Yates, Havok's Vice President, Product Management comments, "The Mac is an important piece of technology and because of the cross-platform nature of Havok's technology, the port to Mac was easy to do. Furthermore, Blizzard Entertainment's commitment to OS X and to the Mac community is a good indication of the growth potential of the Mac as a games platform. Blizzard has always put out great games on the Mac, and we look forward to Havok becoming a part of that tradition."

Blizzard has always been good to the Apple community, even when Mac gamers were even worse off than they are now. Eliza Gauger

Havok Press Release [Havok]

For this reason, the next big revolution in gaming is definitely going to be physics processors. We all know it. So we're excited that NVidia and Havok are set to demonstrate the first GPU-powered physics solution at GDC. The solution will offload physics processing from the CPU to the GPU, allowing developers to program more realistic physics — effects like smoke, liquid, friction, debris and gravity — without slowing games down to a crawl.

Excellent news. Developers — please start designing the Katamari Breastacy game we suggested above post haste.

NVIDIA and Havok Demonstrate World's First GPU-Powered Game Physics Solution at Game Developer's Conference [Yahoo]

We just got word that Havok's co-founder spoke at an Irish university and talked about their next generation physics engine. Kotaku reader Conor was there and took copious notes.

Read Conor's full report after the jump.

Steven Collins, co-founder of Havok (physics engine for Halo 2, Half-Life 2, etc.), is back as a lecturer at my college now (in Dublin, Ireland), and he gave a talk today about the physics of computer games. He showed some new impact/collision stuff that was pretty amazing, including a rubber duck (read "PS3") one where over 1,500 ducks were fired simultaneously at a large building, which was destroyed incredibly realistically, all in real-time. They've done some new impact stuff that's pretty amazing. He talked a lot about character physics too, a lot about having more dynamic movement- feet actually standing on a surface rather than gliding along, all that. The most impressive stuff was a soldier walking up and down and across stairs with each football landing properly on a step, or a soldier jumping into a wall of boxes and reacting completely realistically to the impact. Another really good bit was when he ran the soldier into a wall so that it just clipped his shoulder which bounced back while he kept running... it looked perfect. Someone asked about dedicated physics processing units but he said it wasn't something that they were considering right now, but that if a major developer asked them to support something like that, they would. And... he mentioned something about their physics engine being given to developers for the PS3 too.