Havok on Its Comeback, Abilities & Unreal Engine 5.5 Integration

Introduction

Hi, I’m David Coghlan, the General Manager of Havok. We currently offer three main products. Our most well-known product is Havok Physics, a technology that allows developers to create highly realistic game worlds and environments where objects behave authentically based on their surroundings.

The second product is Havok Cloth, which simulates various clothing materials with high realism. Lastly, Havok Navigation is a tool that realistically enables characters to navigate through a 3D game world. This includes not only walking but also allowing other characters, such as swarms of enemies, to fly or traverse walls and other surfaces.

Havok takes pride in having many of its founding members still on the team in Dublin, ensuring that some of the greatest game physics knowledge in the world remains all in one place. The Havok team is spread worldwide, with offices in Europe, the USA, and Japan. This enables us to bring expert support to our customers regardless of their location.

Providing Top Products for Big Companies

We became widely recognised when our engine played a key role in the gameplay and overall experience of Half-Life 2 and Max Payne 2. Since then, our technology has been utilised in some of the largest and most renowned games and franchises, including Spider-Man, Call of Duty, Elden Ring, Gears of War, Mario, Zelda, Halo, Helldivers, Assassin's Creed, and more. Most recently, Havok Physics was used in Astro Bot, which won Game of the Year. And all three Havok products were used in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

Although we've been quiet recently due to our work with major franchises, our 25th anniversary has inspired us to celebrate the fantastic work that talented game developers and creators have achieved using our technology. We've expanded our offering beyond our well-known physics engine to include Cloth and Navigation products, which have become equally essential for many of our partners. Additionally, the new pricing model we recently announced makes Havok more accessible to smaller and mid-sized studios, providing them with the tools larger AAA studios use to create award-winning games.

Integration with Unreal Engine 5.5

All Havok products are available as plug-ins for Unreal Engine, making it very easy for developers to try out and use Havok technology in Unreal. Unreal Engine adoption has grown significantly in the past few years, in many ways becoming the standard for AAA game content creation and game development workflows. We understand that one key reason for this rapid adoption is the proven workflows it offers.

A core pillar of our Unreal offering is to provide the performance and robustness of the Havok technology while embracing and improving the workflows Unreal users know. We offer an expanded feature set that gives users more options to differentiate their game further. For instance, the Havok Physics Particle system, which works with Nanite, allows users to add physical simulation to their particle systems.

Havok Physics for Unity

Havok Physics for Unity brings the performance and power of Havok Physics into the Unity DOTS framework. Users can seamlessly switch the physics engine and simulate dynamic objects in their games using Havok Physics under the hood. Compared to Unity Physics simulation, Havok Physics for Unity offers better simulation performance, higher simulation quality, and deeper profiling and debugging capabilities.

Havok's Capabilities

We’ve been met with a lot of goodwill and affection for Havok from people who have grown up with some of the incredible gaming experiences we’ve enabled in the last 25 years. Gamers really like how our three products work together to create a realistic game world and are excited to see some of the innovative ways we're developing our tech. For example, check out the recent balloon demo where we rendered thousands of objects behaving realistically – and it all runs on a mid-range laptop, showing how we've optimised the engine to work with more limited resources.

We've also released our Canyon Demo to show more destructive environments because gamers love to see things get blown up! Our goal remains to empower game developers to differentiate their games by providing the building blocks for developers to efficiently build gameplay systems in a way that doesn’t add to the cost of building the game.

The Havok Balloons demo, for example, was created using Unreal Engine's Niagara, just like any other particle system. The only extra step needed to achieve the behaviour demonstrated in this demo is to check a box that enables Havok Physics for the particle systems.

David Coghlan, the General Manager of Havok

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford