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Intel Purchases Havok
Dr. Eggman writes "Gamasutra has the recent announcement; Intel has purchased Havok. 'As the firm noted, Havok 5 features enhancements to its core products, Havok Physics and Havok Animation, and introduces new features for Havok Behavior, a system for developing event-driven character behaviors in a game. Some of the games using Havok technology, particularly its Havok Physics solution, include BioShock, Stranglehold, Halo 2, Half Life 2, Oblivion, Crackdown, and MotorStorm - the company is also rapidly developing and marketing further tool products.' No word on what (if anything) Intel plans to do with its new acquisition."
Intel's gonna do what Intel always does - they're gonna turn that stuff into silicon. Expect a physics engine chip from Intel.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Best way to get ahead in reviews? Optimize a common CPU-intensive component for your products. So long as they provide a generic implementation compatible with competitors' products, game developers will stay happy. But they'll still get that extra FPS lead that ensures benchmark scores over AMD, and a few FPS is all it takes.
They're doing something along those lines with the GPU space. Technically, a GPU is little more than a stream processor. Something
you can do 3D graphics with, or DSP, or Physics, etc. I still have to wonder what they were thinking when they snapped up Havok.
They are in the Silicon business predominately- doing some specialized libraries that help highlight their chips that occasionally
get used, mostly because while it makes Intel's chips look good, they don't do as hot on all things with AMD CPUs. So, typically,
people avoid their libs for anything production like a game.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
All game consoles of the current generation use non-Intel chips. Amongst games devs, Havok are reowned for their quality technical support, and the work they put into tweaking their physics engine for all the platforms, Intel PCs, AMD, and PPC consoles.
What's to say Havok won't "focus" their optimization efforts in the future on Intel exclusively?
This is sort of like what Sony did with SN systems (a very good maker of third-party dev tools for consoles) and then dropping all support for non-Sony platforms.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
There's no point in trying to accelerate game AI since even the most sophisticated game AIs are really very simple. Most game AI is just finite state machines. Each state typically corresponds to a simple behavior (e.g. patrol this area, pursue the player, etc.). More sophisticated game AI generally just means more states.
Even so-called learning AIs typically consist of changing the frequency with which different preset behaviors are used.
Only games like Civilization where there are a lot of choices to be made can really saturate a processor with AI tasks. And even those aren't that complicated; they just have a lot of stuff to do.
Both ATI and Nvidia's GPU based physics acceleration were being made to work with Havok. ATI was working on a 3 card Crossfire rig, 2 for graphics, 1 for physics. I wonder what this will mean for future developments. http://ati.amd.com/technology/crossfire/physics/index.html
PPUs are a dead end thing and Intel is quite aware of that. They aren't a big enough improvement over what a good multi-core processor can do. They also suffer from the "chicken and egg" support problem. Even if the PPU was way above what a processor can do, does a game bother? The problem is that you can't very well go and use the PPU for physics that affect the gameplay. That would mean you'd have to restrict the game to only PPU owners, who are too small a number to make that economical. So that means you have to restrict it to showy physics, things like more fragments in explosions and such. Fair enough, but most people won't buy a card for that. I mean if you've got $300 to blow what makes for better eye candy: A PPU that makes some physics related things look at little better or a high end GPU that makes EVERYTHING look better?
As such it is extremely hard to get it to go past the critical mass where enough people have them that you can start requiring them in games for core gameplay. Thus it makes sense to just start taking advantage of the increasing power in CPUs and use that instead.
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Can I have a refund for the IQ points I lost by reading that?
The only people who really would enjoy games with smart AI are a subset of people who play chess and similar games.
The rest would grumble that the game is too hard. Most humans can't beat a single really really good AI, or thousands of weak AIs. So why bother accelerating AI.
Most people want games that are fun. Just some clever heuristics will be good enough.
I play guild wars and the "heroes" (computer controller teammates) are better than most random humans (in fact they do a lot of things better than I do - I can't multitask well, have slower reflexes etc), and they could be made much smarter (they tend to cluster together and get nuked), but that would take the challenge out of the game, unless the opponents are made equally intelligent, in which case it would be battle of the AIs with the humans being insignificant, and thus not much fun for the humans.
I'm amazed how rarely it gets mentioned, but you know, there is an open competitor, sort of. I say "sort of" because I've never actually written a game that needed physics, so I don't know whether ODE is to Havok as OpenGL/SDL is to DirectX/D3D.
Also raises the question: Will Intel force everyone to use Havok to take advantage of any physics-related silicon they develop? Or will they be friendlier to ODE? Or will they not create any physics-specific silicon, and make this whole discussion moot?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Yes, because the only people who could enjoy AI that did more than basic pathfinding and state-tree seaches are chess players(???)
Good AI != Tough AI. With today's technology, you can easily make an AI that always knows where the player is, always selects the best weapon, and always hits the target for "massive damage"(tm). This is trivial. The only reason you don't see this is because the game wouldn't be any fun.
The trick is making AI that is interesting, fair, and fun. In an FPS I don't want to have my head shot off unless I believe I earned it (i.e. If I walk down the middle of a battlefield, I deserved it. If I'm sneaking in the shadows, they shouldn't be able to see me.). In an RPG, I want a world full of background AI that react to my actions and have lives of their own (Farmer Bob tends to the field until I set his sheep on fire. Then he comes at me with an axe.). And so on.
Complex AI like this can take a long time to design, debug, and test. And the AI programmers normally get 8-12% of the CPU to do it with (2005 stats, we may have more now). If we could offload some of that AI onto hardware, we could have a lot more of it.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
AMD licenses the MMX and SSE crap from intel.