Showing off Havok 4.0 Physics Engine for the PS3

If you run up to a wall and slam right into it – as expected – or if you nail a bullet into some odd terrorist’s head and he collapses onto the ground like a rag doll – again, as expected – that’s usually the physics engine doing the work. The physics engine handles the interaction of game objects in real time. And one of the leading examples of that is the Havok middleware physics engine, used in many familiar FPS titles like Half-Life 2 and even the Matrix trilogy.

Havok – the company that makes the software – showed off its latest version of Havok (the software) running off PC and PS3 setups at the 2006 CEDEC Developer’s Conference. We have three shots of their visual presentation taken from Famitsu.com, showing off Havok Spectrum 4.0’s particle and collision physics being calculated and rendered in real time.

Besides physics, the software can now handle character behavior in reaction to physics. No more unnaturally collapsing rag dolls. If something hard and fast hits you in the body in such a way that it will twist your body, your body will twist – and the Havok Spectrum 4.0 will properly calculate and display that result. (At least, that’s as much as we can understand from trying to translate our source article).

Perhaps the most interesting tidbit generated by Havok was comparisons of the software operating between the PS3 and PC. Havok Spectrum 4.0 is fully compatible with all the next-gen console systems. Obviously more powerful processors are needed to handle the heavy calculation loads that software like Havok will bring. One slide presented at the CEDEC conference showed that in terms of processing speed, the PS3 runs Havok 4.0 almost as fast as a triple-core PC.

Two of the games announced to be using the Havok engine are Halo 3 and the Sonic series.

If you run up to a wall and slam right into it – as expected – or if you nail a bullet into some odd terrorist’s head and he collapses onto the ground like a rag doll – again, as expected – that’s usually the physics engine doing the work. The physics engine handles the interaction of game objects in real time. And one of the leading examples of that is the Havok middleware physics engine, used in many familiar FPS titles like Half-Life 2 and even the Matrix trilogy.

Havok – the company that makes the software – showed off its latest version of Havok (the software) running off PC and PS3 setups at the 2006 CEDEC Developer’s Conference. We have three shots of their visual presentation taken from Famitsu.com, showing off Havok Spectrum 4.0’s particle and collision physics being calculated and rendered in real time.

Besides physics, the software can now handle character behavior in reaction to physics. No more unnaturally collapsing rag dolls. If something hard and fast hits you in the body in such a way that it will twist your body, your body will twist – and the Havok Spectrum 4.0 will properly calculate and display that result. (At least, that’s as much as we can understand from trying to translate our source article).

Perhaps the most interesting tidbit generated by Havok was comparisons of the software operating between the PS3 and PC. Havok Spectrum 4.0 is fully compatible with all the next-gen console systems. Obviously more powerful processors are needed to handle the heavy calculation loads that software like Havok will bring. One slide presented at the CEDEC conference showed that in terms of processing speed, the PS3 runs Havok 4.0 almost as fast as a triple-core PC.

Two of the games announced to be using the Havok engine are Halo 3 and the Sonic series.