Havok Team Profiled

obchrisj writes "Chief Technology Office of Havok, Steve Collins, has spoken to FileFront about the team, their projects, and the trials and tribulations they had on their way to success. FileFront profiled Havok and their technology in an article titled: "F! True Project Story: Havok". The Havok physics engine powers many popular titles, including Valve's Half-Life 2."

Comments

List of titles

[Anonymous Coward]

They publish a list of titles that use Havok. You'd be suprised what all is in there, its not just first person shooters.
HAVOK Title list here.

The funniest part of this technology

[CrazyJim1]

A 3d real physics world is a core component of true artificial intelligence. Why haven't we seen artificial intelligence even though people have been researching it for 40+ years? Because you need a 3d world with true physics. This is something we're just finally seeing in games, and not executed perfectly with electromagnetism and other forces incorporated yet. We're in the infacy of true computing. Once someone makes a natural language input to interface with a 3d world: ie"Show me a forest with one tree that has red leaves." then the computer can 'understand' what a human is talking about. You could then ask it questions about the scene it's thinking about, or ask it to complete a task given certain rules: ie "You are 1' wide, make a path to the flag through a bunch of blocks scattered in the level I just created." up to the medium,"Go buy my groceries and then mow the lawn.", finally to the advanced,"Find a cure for some disease."

Now given Havok probably won't be used for true AI, another physics engine will probably do that, it is nice to see some baby steps being made in the realm. Imagine if you went back 200 years, and tried to explain a Ferrari to someone. Not only are the parts not there to make it, but the road isn't there either. You'd have to explain how cow paths would eventually evolve to be highways.

Re:The funniest part of this technology

[SammyJ]

Actualy people 200 years ago would easily understand the concept of highways. Hell, we've had trade routes for thousands of years. Ever hear of caravans or carriages? They used roads to travel between cities. Not to different from modern highways, no?

Also, why is a 3D engine required for AI? Wouldn't it be easier to get AI to think about abstract data, without the overhead of a 3D engine and physics simulations?

Re:The funniest part of this technology

[FinestLittleSpace]

i dont believe AI has anything to do with 3d environments or ANYTHING of the such, in EXACTLY the same way that 3D physics engines are nowhere near to what they actually, by intelligent theory, should be.

The problem with everything here is it's people trying to do eye candy before solving the real problem: realistic, convincing environments come from EVERYTHING being involved in a physics model. The floor should be attached to a scale globe which has it's own gravity, every item should have it's own gravity, no matter how minute, and when in a shooting game, the bullets should be physical entities, and when shot should only 'fly' because there's particles/pressure in the gun pushing it outwards.

It's a long way off, but I feel many people miss the point that rather than hacksawing together various rules, it's becoming time that everything has things applied to it, no matter how insignificant. AIR should be a particle in the game's memory just like a solid object... etc etc.........

The problem? we simply don't have the processing power for this... or rather we do, but we're expected to use a hell of a lot of this for gfx processing.

Back to AI. AI isnt about designing for an environment, it's about designing for anything. That's what AI is; adaptive, thinks about whatever environment it is in and acts accordingly. IF there's restricted physics rules, it tries to figure out the limits ...etcetc............

We just don't have the power.

(IMHO)

(I could be rambling)

Re:The funniest part of this technology

[bonzoesc]

"You don't think you need 3d when you talk about basic stuff, but if you remember to when you were a kid and just learning basic problem solving, you'd remember you'd even use objects to count."

That's because animals have evolved to understand 3D space, because that's what we live in. If we could snatch pieces of information out of thin air, silently issue commands to devices across the globe, and such, it wouldn't be advantageous for us to try and visualize a network of computers in a 3D way, because we'd have our own internal representation of it in the form it most easily takes.

Re:The funniest part of this technology

[GreyWolf3000]

Please. Those highways were intelligently designed.

Re:The funniest part of this technology

[iridium_ionizer]

The really odd thing is that someone could create a highly complex physics simulation in a 3D graphics environment. And it would be able to run easily on most computers, if they would just use simpler graphics. Unfortunately, to my knowledge neither hobbiests nor game companies have made much of an effort to this approach.

Havoc is pretty good but even they have admitted in interviews that they dumb down the physics a bit to save processor power (90% right for 10% of the effort. They just want it to LOOK right not neccessarily BE right.

So to all of you aspiring game designers, instead of coding games that are approaching the look of A-list titles, just code simpler graphics with lots of interaction. The original Quake engine is open-sourced. There are plenty of non-proprietary methods to simulate physics (see your local university library). And you could always attach a couple of ALICE bots to some animated models. Throw in a few fun gamplay objectives. And... poof! You'd have a Katamari Damacy-like cult sucess on your hands.

Re:The funniest part of this technology

[snorklewacker]

Yeah, but the lag til you get to respawn is terrible -- no one's actually managed to even do it. There's rumours of some players who did, but they were in god mode.