Game Developers 08 Conference: Havok 5.5 released

During the Game Developers Conference 08 in San Francisco, the company Havok has released version 5.5 of its renowned game engine of the same name. The announcement was done by no less than Managing Director David O’Meara.

There have been many changes to the engine that promise to make gameplay experience more immersive. Know all about these changes after the jump!

One exciting development that came out of the currently unfolding Game Developers Conference is the announcement of version 5.5 of the game engine Havok. It was developed by a company of the same name.

According to the company, version 5.5 comes with major enhancements that will directly affect its core products, namely: Havok Physics, Havok Animation, and Havok Behavior. The overall effect of this changes is a more immersive gameplay experience and faster cross platform development.

Havok Managing Director David O’Meara said, “Havok 5.5 represents the most innovative version of our suite of products to date, and with it Havok will help drive the next generation of bestsellers and award-winners.”

O’Meara further detailed the changes that come with Havok 5.5. The highlights are as follows:

• Provides a new level of continuous multiplatform physics optimization as well as enhanced collision query optimizations especially for the PlayStation 3.
• Delivers developers and artists improved tools and technology including Spline based compression, export of Float Channels for morph target support, and Multithreading optimizations.
• These enhancements deliver better performance by reducing memory consumption, giving the animator full control over compression accuracy compression and providing constant time depression.
• Easy to use export, sampling and blending capabilities allows developers to significantly cut content creation times and memory requirements.
• Brings new power to developers and artists, with another leap forward in interactive character behavior authoring.
• Includes an enhanced Behavior SDK and tools. These allow further run-time optimizations and more modifiers, improved Physics workflow, modified visualization of behavior trees, improved global character positioning and activity transitioning, as well as other improved asset management features, significantly empowering teams and accelerating production overall.