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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
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.
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.
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.
They did it with their C compiler in the past. When they detected anything but an Intel processor they didn't use the SMD instructions even when the processor indicated full support for SMD *IN THE INTEL DOCUMENTED WAY* You can Google for the details.