Havok Team Profiled

obchrisj writes "Chief Technology Office of Havok, Steve Collins, has spoken to FileFront about the team, their projects, and the trials and tribulations they had on their way to success. FileFront profiled Havok and their technology in an article titled: "F! True Project Story: Havok". The Havok physics engine powers many popular titles, including Valve's Half-Life 2."

Re:The funniest part of this technology

[SammyJ]

Actualy people 200 years ago would easily understand the concept of highways. Hell, we've had trade routes for thousands of years. Ever hear of caravans or carriages? They used roads to travel between cities. Not to different from modern highways, no?

Also, why is a 3D engine required for AI? Wouldn't it be easier to get AI to think about abstract data, without the overhead of a 3D engine and physics simulations?

Re:The funniest part of this technology

[FinestLittleSpace]

i dont believe AI has anything to do with 3d environments or ANYTHING of the such, in EXACTLY the same way that 3D physics engines are nowhere near to what they actually, by intelligent theory, should be.

The problem with everything here is it's people trying to do eye candy before solving the real problem: realistic, convincing environments come from EVERYTHING being involved in a physics model. The floor should be attached to a scale globe which has it's own gravity, every item should have it's own gravity, no matter how minute, and when in a shooting game, the bullets should be physical entities, and when shot should only 'fly' because there's particles/pressure in the gun pushing it outwards.

It's a long way off, but I feel many people miss the point that rather than hacksawing together various rules, it's becoming time that everything has things applied to it, no matter how insignificant. AIR should be a particle in the game's memory just like a solid object... etc etc.........

The problem? we simply don't have the processing power for this... or rather we do, but we're expected to use a hell of a lot of this for gfx processing.

Back to AI. AI isnt about designing for an environment, it's about designing for anything. That's what AI is; adaptive, thinks about whatever environment it is in and acts accordingly. IF there's restricted physics rules, it tries to figure out the limits ...etcetc............

We just don't have the power.

(IMHO)

(I could be rambling)

Re:The funniest part of this technology

[bonzoesc]

"You don't think you need 3d when you talk about basic stuff, but if you remember to when you were a kid and just learning basic problem solving, you'd remember you'd even use objects to count."

That's because animals have evolved to understand 3D space, because that's what we live in. If we could snatch pieces of information out of thin air, silently issue commands to devices across the globe, and such, it wouldn't be advantageous for us to try and visualize a network of computers in a 3D way, because we'd have our own internal representation of it in the form it most easily takes.