Havok has struck a deal with leading games publisher Saber Interactive – the firm behind leading titles such as TimeShift and Will Rock – to use the Dublin software firm’s Destruction product in upcoming video games.
Havok Destruction is the company’s recently released cross-platform productivity tool created for the simulation of rigid body destruction.
Games that implement Havok Destruction feature a dramatically higher level of realism in structural mechanics, graphical effects and overall level design within game environments.
Game developer Saber Interactive is known for fast and furious adrenaline-pumping gameplay in its action game titles. It will take advantage of Havok Destruction’s advanced physics mechanisms to bring a new scale and complexity to the fully destructible city within its next game title.
Havok Destruction is being used to punch holes in walls, buckle scaffolding, shatter windows, and even bend metal to create a truly dynamic and evolving cityscape.
“By implementing Havok Destruction, our team was able to easily and rapidly integrate large-scale destruction sequences, complex destructible objects and events into the existing framework of our upcoming games that would have absorbed a much greater amount of development time and been nearly impossible to pull off without Havok,” explained Andrey Jones, chief operations officer of Saber Interactive.
“Since integrating Havok Destruction, Saber’s art department has dramatically reduced the cost of generating destruction-related assets. By using Havok’s toolset, the artists are given full control over physics and destruction properties of various in-game objects, and are able to do physics setup without the help of programmers. This has reduced our interactive asset generation budget by at least 40pc,” Jones added.
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 100pc for the same period last year.
Bestselling 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.
By John Kennedy
Pictured: gameplay from Saber Interactive’s Time Shift
