Havok goes free on PC

Hey All, This looks promising, check out the following link:
http://www.developmag.com/news/29350/Havok-goes-free-on-PC

Sounds great, so who is up for creating a plugin for Blitz product ;-)

physx has got to be better?

hardly any games use physx, especially good game. Wonder what the reason is. When looking at the PPU chip, there was only about 2 games coming out using it over the next year.

I think theres a reason that Physx was sold to Nvidia. Partly because it was a dead duck without strong industry backing behind it. Compare the Physx lineup to Havok and theres a huge difference. Havok turns up everywhere, Physx only has a handfull of games, and only sparked interest with indie devs because it was free.

Havok is great especially when it comes to more complex stuff. PhysX is good for for more simple stuff too. By hte way according to their site it's only for free for non commercial work but:

"Havok has entered into an agreement with Intel, Havok’s parent company, under which approved game developers on the PC platform can execute a commercial distribution license with Havok for free."

NVidia bought Ageia for their patents, not for their technology.

This is interesting. I have been helping with the beta testing for Newton 2.0, and I don't think the simplicity and performance of that system will be easy to beat. Actually, if Havok is designed anything like PhysX was, I don't think that many people will actually take advantage of this offer. I am betting their SDK is incredibly complicated for such an expensive package.

I am basing this on my experience working with PhysX versus Newton. PhysX had a lot of marketing claiming it was the best, but it was perhaps the worst physics SDKs I have worked with.

Physx or a variation of it is about to appear on every new nvidia card.

were using Newton too in Flow at the moment. We havent adopted Newton 2 Beta yet because the ogre implementation is also in beta and were trying to keep away from unfinished code.

Were really impressed with newton so far, although we are currently having problem seperating our timing between physics/logic and rendering in ogre. Newton tree collisions seem fast in the current version, and I hear that was one of the areas that was optimized in Newton 2.0

Leadwerks: I agree with you now about PhysX - it's API just isn't pleasant to work with, and it has a lot of issues that don't show up until you get into more complex stuff. I'm going to switch to Bullet or Newton 2.0 (hopefully it will be released officially soon?).


Hopefully the new version will be greatly improved. nVidia is well known among developers for it's excellent free tools/SDKs, etc., and I don't think physics will be an exception.

@Leadwerks
Simplified i would say i found Havok very reliable to work with, PhysX nice for it's speed and ODE has it's issues. I've never used Newton so far in a real project. Is V2 a rigidbody only engine? Anything you can tell about it?

Ugh?

It's free for NON commercial use yet they say...

"This is fantastic news for commercial PC game developers as well as the independent game development community, who will really benefit from this move"

I am confused.

They have to define commercial. They may mean published non shareware games. Or you might have to make a sum like $250k in profits before considered commercial.

I suspect they consider shareware and commercial as two seperate things, but someone needs to clarify that.

hmm, does Blitz3d have a newton wrapper? does newton 1 or 2 support cloth?

@John J If your using Ogrenewt, Walaber already has a version for the Newton 2.0 beta, its not avaliable to the public till newton 2.0 us released officialy. Might be able to ask for it.

It's not my place to comment on Newton 2.

This does not seem to be a no-strings deal:

You mean like...

I am not going to talk about specific features.

I german you would say "Erst gackern und dann net legen!" ;O)

It's been released: http://www.havok.com

It looks like it's free to use in commercial games that will sell at $10 or less.