Hardware News

Havok Interview

Joe "OuTkAsT-1" Topolnisky

2005-01-13 00:02:00.0


The FileFront has caught up with Havok's Steve Collins for a quick Q&A regarding their popular physics engine. They chat about everything from working with game developers to how the engine started out. Snip:

Q: What type of testing and research did you do for the engine to make the physics more realistic?
A: It’s sorta interesting in that for the game engine we’re not interested inaccuracy. We spend all our time on performance and memory usage optimization. The laws of physics are pretty well known, and writing a simulator is actually reasonably straightforward. The catch is making it fast and robust enough to deploy in a game. So the rule of thumb is “does is look right”. If it looks right then it is right, and the people who judge that are the game designers and artists not the engineers. In many situations in games, the physics is very unrealistic: people don’t run at 80 mph but in FPS games they do. In order to optimize the engine we sacrifice realism for speed, and push that compromise to the point where the physics is still plausible.


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