In a surprising move, Intel’s Havok division (the physics SDK developer that Intel bought a few years back) has just acquired Trinigy and their 3D Vision Engine. It’s a surprising move for Intel, who dropped their Larrabee and Project Offset projects long ago. For Havok tho, this may be an attempt at growing their physics SDK to include cross-platform gaming.
“The team at Trinigy is very excited by the opportunity to join Havok.” said Felix Roeken, General Manager of Trinigy. “Havok and Trinigy have been partners for a number of years and both companies share very similar philosophies about how technology should be built and delivered to customers. We are confident that this acquisition will be very positive for Trinigy’s customers and employees.”
Andrew Bond, Vice President of Engineering for Havok, introduces some of Havok’s cloth and destruction physics effects, prior to announcing the free availability of the Havok SDK for AppUp games developers.
Over at Develop, they have an exclusive excerpt from Ballistic Publishing’s ‘Art of Uncharted 2′, where they get very in-depth on the creation of some of the iconic scenes from Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. I really loved the opening where they discuss the marriage of presimulated physics run in Maya to real-time physics done via their in-game Havok engine.
We also wanted to increase our use of pre-simulated physics so if we had a major destruction effect like a building collapsing, we’d pre-simulate all that in Maya, bake all that animation down, and then run that through the game engine. So you’d have real-time control of the player, but the building collapsing is a pre-simulated event.
To push things further we also wanted to layer our real-time physics objects over the pre-simulated events. So in the collapsing building sequence we’ve also got computer monitors and plants that are rolling around in real-time reacting to the environment.
To add a third layer on top of that, we also added physics-driven particles, so we have sparks that are coming off the light fixtures, that are particles hitting the ground and bouncing. It’s pretty amazing that it actually works.
To complete the effect you’ve got enemies that you’re shooting while the building is collapsing, and when they’re killed they turn into rag-dolls flopping around the environment.
The overall result of all these effects is to overwhelm the player so that they don’t really have time to pick it apart and figure out: ‘Hey, that’s pre-simulated, and that’s real-time.’ We just want them to get caught up and pulled into the whole experience. All they know is they’re controlling Drake and trying to survive.
Linden Labs has announced some of the features they are working on for the Q2 release of the Second Life tools, and it has some great additions. One thing many designers have been craving is support for Mesh Import, allowing much simpler import of 3dsMax and Maya models into the world. One thing users will love is the new integration of the Havok physics engine inworld.
Server 1.40 is primarily going to roll out the Havok 7 Physics Engine. The Havok 7 engine will provide some nice performance enhancements, but the work is foundational as we look ahead into later in 2010 and 2011. Also in Server 1.40 are web services that will make the integration between the Second Life Marketplace and the inworld Second Life experience smoother than it is at the moment. We anticipate shipping Server 1.40 by summer.
Linden is careful to state that some of these may not make it, but I’m sure they wouldn’t be talking about them unless they were already fairly far along in development.
Update 1:30pm: Here’s a video of some of the Havok features:
Feeling the heat from the recent free releases of the Unreal3 and Unity engines, Havok has decided to roll out their own “Indie Developer Programme”, however it’s a bit difficult to determine what exactly they are calling an “indie” developer.
Designed to enable independent game studios to execute their creative visions using Havok’s premium, developer-preferred middleware technology, the Independent Developer Program helps studios minimize the overall risk and high cost associated with internal creation of the tools and technologies required to power today’s sophisticated video and PC games. Krome Studios is the first to license Havok tools and technology under the Independent Developer Program.
In the press release they make reference to Krome Studios as an independent developer, however with their recent work with LucasArts game “Star Wars the Clone Wars: Republic Heroes”, a 400 person staff and classification as the largest software developer in Australia, I’m not so sure that’s indie.
In the latest “nTeresting Newsletter” from Brian Burke, PR guy for NVidia, he discusses the recent forays by AMD/ATI into GPU Accelerated Physics. I disagree that there hasn’t been “a peep” from AMD, as we covered the GPGPU accelerated Havok back in March and then the demonstration video. But I do agree that NVidia has a far lead in OpenCL develoment over.. well, over everyone.
Right before mourning ‘the death of GPU physics’, AMD had the great idea that they would partner up with the Intel owned Havok Physics engine (I told you that was a bad idea). Since then over a year has past and not a peep. Until now. Now their plan is “Bullet”.
“Bullet Physics Library is an open source physics library that is now getting translated into OpenCL, thanks to the effort of companies such as AMD [who offered support to developers]. Somehow, we feel that this announcement was the highlight of the launch event for the upcoming Evergreen generation of graphics cards.”
Reality is that AMD has no GPU driver for OpenCL and NVIDIA has had one for some time. What does that really mean to people developing Bullet Physics for OpenCL? Fudzilla asked the creator of the Bullet Physics, Erwin Coumans:
“Bullet’s GPU acceleration via OpenCL will work with any compliant drivers, we use NVIDIA GeForce cards for our development and even use code from their OpenCL SDK, they are a great technology partner.”
NVIDIA is the leader for stereoscopic 3D, GPU physics, OpenCL, DirectCompute and GPU Computing. #1 with a Bullet.
NVidia is getting rave reviews for their amazing graphics & the PhysX support in Batman: Arkham Asylum. I got to give NVidia credit for actually having their product (PhysX) in a game that’s actually available. What’s your thoughts?
Havok & AMD have put a video on Youtube that shows the power of GPGPU-Accelerated physics engines (eg. AMD + Havok).
This demo shows Havok Cloth in action, simulating 25 dancers, each one wearing a high resolution (7000 polygons) red dress. This demo is completely interactive and runs at solid 60FPS on a standard PC. The dress polygonal model is based on a real-world dress and was provided by Optitex Limited.
Toms Hardware has the scoop on AMD/ATI’s latest GDC talk:
“Hear the latest on game computing featuring open standards-based physics with OpenCL and ATI Stream and increasing content scalability through server-side rendering powered by AMD s Fusion Render Cloud ” reads the session detail over on the official GDC site (link). According to AMD Software Manager Terry Makedon Havok is indeed the partner of choice and the company plans to demonstrate ATI hardware-accelerated physics during the presentation (Twitter). “Go check out the session if you are around should be educational ” he said.
Sounds like AMD & ATI got fed up about hearing NVidia putting PhysX on everything, so they’ve decided to team up with one of the biggies (Havok) and optimize it for GPGPU acceleration on ATI cards.
In a surprising move, Intel’s Havok division (the physics SDK developer that Intel bought a few years back) has just acquired Trinigy and their 3D Vision Engine. It’s a surprising move for Intel, who dropped their Larrabee and Project Offset projects long ago. For Havok tho, this may be an attempt at growing their physics SDK to include cross-platform gaming.
Over at Develop, they have an exclusive excerpt from 
Linden Labs has announced some of the features they are working on for the Q2 release of the Second Life tools, and it has some great additions. One thing many designers have been craving is support for Mesh Import, allowing much simpler import of 3dsMax and Maya models into the world. One thing users will love is the new integration of the Havok physics engine inworld.
Feeling the heat from the recent free releases of the Unreal3 and Unity engines, Havok has decided to roll out their own “Indie Developer Programme”, however it’s a bit difficult to determine what exactly they are calling an “indie” developer.
In the latest “nTeresting Newsletter” from 
VizWorld.com 
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