Intel Purchases Havok 123
Dr. Eggman writes "Gamasutra has the recent announcement; Intel has purchased Havok. 'As the firm noted, Havok 5 features enhancements to its core products, Havok Physics and Havok Animation, and introduces new features for Havok Behavior, a system for developing event-driven character behaviors in a game. Some of the games using Havok technology, particularly its Havok Physics solution, include BioShock, Stranglehold, Halo 2, Half Life 2, Oblivion, Crackdown, and MotorStorm - the company is also rapidly developing and marketing further tool products.' No word on what (if anything) Intel plans to do with its new acquisition."
What Intel's gonna do (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What Intel's gonna do (Score:5, Funny)
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Sincerely,
your friendly AC spelling Nazi
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Anyhow, thanks for noticing.
The Conquest of Precision (Score:2)
Besides, people find all those corrections to be really obnoxious. That's why we can never raise the army of rabid followers you really need for world domin
Re:What Intel's gonna do (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite the opposite. Intel's going to work on making it scale well across multiple CPU cores so that gamers will want to buy quad core CPUs.
Making you want to replace your CPU more often is much more attractive to Intel than starting a whole new completely unproven niche hardware line.
Actually... (Score:5, Insightful)
you can do 3D graphics with, or DSP, or Physics, etc. I still have to wonder what they were thinking when they snapped up Havok.
They are in the Silicon business predominately- doing some specialized libraries that help highlight their chips that occasionally
get used, mostly because while it makes Intel's chips look good, they don't do as hot on all things with AMD CPUs. So, typically,
people avoid their libs for anything production like a game.
Yep (Score:5, Insightful)
As such it is extremely hard to get it to go past the critical mass where enough people have them that you can start requiring them in games for core gameplay. Thus it makes sense to just start taking advantage of the increasing power in CPUs and use that instead.
Re:Yep (Score:5, Insightful)
So did GPUs when they first came out, of course. What happened then (if you remember) is that games shipped with the option for software rendering or hardware-accelerated rendering for quite a long time. Some older games had patches released to enable hardware rendering (eg Quake, Tomb Raider). I still remember the first time I saw GLQuake running on my housemate's PC. Of course, he didn't have an accelerator, so while it was beautiful, the one frame every few seconds he got was totally unplayable...
Anyway, that said I do tend to agree that physics accelerators simply aren't going to go anywhere any time soon, if ever. GPUs make a huge difference, but PPUs? I don't see it.
That was different in two ways (Score:2)
2) Graphics accelerators made a MASSIVE noticeable improvement on
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Actually it was Quake 1 on a Pentium Pro 200,
VGA 320x240
3Dfx 512x384 (or 640x480)
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I think you're likely right. They can just use this acquisition to sell product.
However, I wonder if they might do something along the lines of creating "Havok accelerated quad cores" (or whatever). Pull a Microsoft/Internet Explorer and bundle a bit of hardware Havok acceleration into all (and it really must be all or close to all of their high end chips) of their chips. This makes a large portion of the market adopt it by default (large enough to make companies code for optimizations just like with Nvidia
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More importantly, they'll get that silicon into the hands of consumers. So we can expect real people to have this in their boxen. Hopefully some one from Xorg will start putting physics into their desktop.
I hope Intel turn physX into the next MMX, even my dad was saying he needed MMX in his next PC. No idea what it was, but Intel marketing had him convinced he needed to upgrad, and upgrade NOW damnit.
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No drivers required is far better than no drivers available.
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If I can buy an integrated graphics solution through AMD or an integrated physics/graphics solution through Intel it's an easy choice, fusion will provide crap graphics and graphics will have a faster upgrade cycle.
There's some really interesting video's floating around about Intel in
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Price... (Score:1)
"Intel agreed to buy 100 per cent of the animation software company Havok,
the name that Telekinesys trades under, for about 79.2 million (euro) cash in a deal expected to close within five days."
AFAIK
havok is an irish company spun out of Trinity Collage Dublin. www.tcd.ie
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Re:What Intel's gonna do (Score:4, Informative)
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Realistic physics is EASY, you just do what the textbook says. Fun physics on the other hand involves an enormous amount of playtesting, analysis and fine tuning.
Re:What Intel's gonna do (Score:4, Interesting)
Never used quad code, but on a Core Duo 2 Bioshock can max out both cores.
Of course, video games tend to handle things in a dumb way so the renderer will render frames as fast as it can - faster than the sync rate of the monitor, so not all of the CPU cycles are actually used usefully, but it does show that Bioshock is parallel enough to have two threads ready constantly.
Back in the old days, video games would have one CPU at 100% and the other essentially unused. I'm not sure how modern game engines do this and whether dual core is a special case they optimized for of course.
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while(true) { addObjects(); doSomething(); render(); if (checkForExit()) break; }
Which would tie up one thread entirely processing that one loop and anything called off it. These types of engines are the ones that you see using 100% of a single core and leaving the other core at 2-3%. Part of the problem is that OpenGL and DirectX are largely dependent on things being done in a particular order (translate sce
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http://www.gamespot.com/features/6177688/p-7.html [gamespot.com]
Essentially if you use a very fast video card and change processors, any single core processor no matter how fast gets 40 fps. And any dual core processor gets around 61-65. It looks like the game FPS saturates quite easily, but the speed up from dual core is pretty impressive.
Why...? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why...? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Why...? (Score:5, Informative)
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Or you can clicke here [swallowtail.org].
Why not? (Score:2)
Intel bore the costs of the x86 R&D, and the costs of marketing the platform, AND the costs of writing an extremely good C compiler. When AMD makes a copycat chip, it's no surprise that they can undercut Intel because they don't have any of those overhead costs. I don't have a problem with AMD legally reverse-engineering the x86, but they have no right to claim foul because they were too ch
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Is that legal? I thought you could make *optimize* something for your own hardware instructions, but can you legally make it worse for other people?
Hi there, you must be new to Reality(TM). We can see the problem here. Youre confusing the word *legal* with *moral*. Its a common urban myth that legality and morality are two sides of the same coin. Thankfully, this is not the case, and this Re-Education Reminder is a friendly reminder of such facts. Welcome to the 21st century, enjoy your stay. This post sponsered by Halliburton, "Unleash the Energy."(TM)
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Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
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Seems like Intel should just hire a guru per third party who can help the programmers at there optimize for Intel CPUs. Since Intel has more cash they can just outspend AMD on this, and their CPUs will do better in benchmarks because all the inner loop stuff is running as well as it possibly can.
Buying the company seems like you want to fold some of its technology into some Intel product, or you want to em
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Awesome (Score:2)
Intel already did on-die AI acceleration (Score:1, Redundant)
It didn't work out and they had to destroy their secret lab [google.com] before it got further out of control.
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Even so-called learning AIs typically consist of changing the frequency with which different preset behaviors are used.
Only games like Civilization where there are a lot of choices to be made can really saturate a processor with AI tasks. And even those aren't that complicated; they just have a lot of stuff to do.
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This isn't true. Many game still use finite state machines (FSM), but you also see things such as Bayesian Networks, Blackboard Architectures, STRIPS, etc.
Even if a game just used FSM, don't you think it would make sense to accelerate that? If I wanted to simulate New York City using only FSM, I would have to do thousands (millions?) of calculations per frame to get the behavior right.
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Gathering data for those decisions isn't. Pathfinding is intensive, and if you've got cycles to burn you can just up the resolution in your pathfinding space. Things like visibility checks are also an area where you can burn basically as many cycles as you want. You can make do with less raycasts, but more raycasts can get you a better picture of the surrounding environment or enemies or what have you.
That said, the main bound on AI is usually not processor tim
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
The rest would grumble that the game is too hard. Most humans can't beat a single really really good AI, or thousands of weak AIs. So why bother accelerating AI.
Most people want games that are fun. Just some clever heuristics will be good enough.
I play guild wars and the "heroes" (computer controller teammates) are better than most random humans (in fact they do a lot of things better than I do - I can't multitask well, have slower reflexes etc), and they could be made much smarter (they tend to cluster together and get nuked), but that would take the challenge out of the game, unless the opponents are made equally intelligent, in which case it would be battle of the AIs with the humans being insignificant, and thus not much fun for the humans.
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Yes, because the only people who could enjoy AI that did more than basic pathfinding and state-tree seaches are chess players(???)
Good AI != Tough AI. With today's technology, you can easily make an AI that always knows where the player is, always selects the best weapon, and always hits the target for "massive damage"(tm). This is trivial. The only reason you don't see this is because the game wouldn't be any fun.
The trick is making AI that is interesting, fair, and fun. In an FPS I don't want to have
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But if you're not looking for "hard", or "pass the turing test" and just looking for "fun", then you don't have to do much, just need a few clever tricks and that's it. Not much CPU needed.
In Guild Wars, there are already enemy AIs in certain PvP arenas which are not that easy to beat, and I'm sure they could make them harder - but what's the benefit to the game maker? Those AI opponents even say GG when they win, I'm sure they could code th
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I'm not sure where to start with this. I'll just say that you have an "interesting view" on what it takes to make game AI fun and leave it at that. :)
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It's probably too little gain to do it in specialized hardware unless people can think of a good way of making a game AI that works well on specialized stuff but not general CPUs, that is much better than doing AI on general CPUs.
If people want intelligent nonhuman entities, I suggest they get one from their local pet store
Maybe game makers could m
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A 'Turing complete' AI isn't an issue, but I think you mean one that passes the 'Turing Test'. This has been done already, and I think the Lovelace Test has been passed as well.
But this is beside the point. Making an AI more human (or more dog-like) isn't always the best goal. For games, it's all about more fun.
(And I would suggest that you play catch with your dog, not Halo3. ;) Even if you could train a dog to play deathmatch, an AI opponent would be much more fun.)
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Better A.I. doesn't mean harder A.I. it means more depth of A.I. mobs not just running in circles, bots that act more human. Friendships between monsters (Or bots in an FPS etc.)
Think of what better A.I. could do for the most popular series of all time, the Sims.
Decision trees are hard, hard to code tough on processors... anything that c
Finally (Score:1)
marketing for the future! (Score:1)
- Partner with MS to integrate havoc engine into future DirectX releases.
- Realistic chance of Physics on GPU standard (AMD/nVIDIA purchase licensing)
- Potentially hurt 3rd parties that use the engine on other chips. (Cell/PhysX)
- Spur next generation of physics engine that
Re:marketing for the future! (Score:4, Funny)
This is disturbing for cross-platform devs. (Score:5, Interesting)
What's to say Havok won't "focus" their optimization efforts in the future on Intel exclusively?
This is sort of like what Sony did with SN systems (a very good maker of third-party dev tools for consoles) and then dropping all support for non-Sony platforms.
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XBox 360 is PPC-based! (I know, it's easy to forget, you just think of PPC being Apple hardware
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Re:This is disturbing for cross-platform devs. (Score:5, Informative)
LetterRip
I for one welcome our physics chip overlords (Score:2)
What will this do to GPU physics? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I think you've hit on the primary motivation here. This may have been done as much to hobble Fusion [wikipedia.org], as to support Nehalem [wikipedia.org].
ODE (Score:4, Interesting)
Also raises the question: Will Intel force everyone to use Havok to take advantage of any physics-related silicon they develop? Or will they be friendlier to ODE? Or will they not create any physics-specific silicon, and make this whole discussion moot?
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ODE is good but, like most open source projects, I think it tries to be too much. It also has some fundamental issues that haven't been worked out yet.
Havok has great game support (for people who can afford it) including support for PS3 and XBox360. It does one thing, game physics, and it does it well.
IMHO
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Bullet is open source, fast, feature rich. Supports Stable stacking amd even moving concave hulls.
ODE is open source but I found it slow, and a little feature poor.
Newton is closed source but free. I found you could easily bog it down and r
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Now moving into the realm of I-have-no-idea-what-I'm-talking-about. That said, here's something from the ODE mailing list:
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Now moving into the realm of I-have-no-idea-what-I'm-talking-about.
I hope you are talking about yourself there. If you read the date that mail is from it is Feb 2006, a lot has happened in that 18 months. If you care to take a look at Bullet's feature list [bulletphysics.com] : you will see that is now supports:
Projected Gauss Siedel (quickstep)
and
Generic 6 Degree of Freedom Constraint , Motors, Limits
In a recent project of mine I created an ODE implementation, but it was painfully slow. I changed my implementation to use Bullet and got about a 5x improvement in performance. For me Bullet was superior, espically in the realms of convex collisions & dynamics.
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Yes, I was. I wanted to acknowledge, up front, that I was quoting / linking to something I don't really understand.
I guess that answers the question of an open API -- I'll bet ODE and Bullet are not drop-in replacements for each other, meaning we have a ways to go before we can do this as generically as we do graphics (OpenGL).
Sad, though.
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I'm sorry I misunderstood your statement at the beginning.
I would say that ODE and Bullet are much more similar to each other in API's than OpenGL and Direct3D are.
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It's not so much a question of difficulty of porting, I'm thinking back to this being an alternative to proprietary lockin to physics hardware, should it ever be useful.
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Multiplatform (Score:2)
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Intel buys Havok for 79.2 million (Score:1)
Easy. (Score:2)
Intel invests in companies that develop products which make people want to buy higher end chips, for example physics-based acoustic instrument simulation like one company I know.
Why the desktop market? (Score:2)
Just an idea.
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For example, running is complicated physics but it's theoretically doable. But in games you want to save overhead so instead of a long formula drawing in all the factors, g
Bummer (Score:2)
Havok finds an exit strategy (Score:2)
This is about Havok's investors finding an exit strategy, I expect. Havok isn't very profitable, and they had to shrink the company considerably a few years back. Game middleware just isn't that profitable a business. Havok found new investors and hung on, replacing their top management, but the new investors need to cash out at some point. This is it.
The other major player in this space was Mathengine, which was a dot-com of sorts - too much initial investment and too little revenue. EA acquired them
Re:So now (Score:4, Funny)
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Yes, a bottle brush and a jug of bleach will fix any IQ problems you may have if you give the old brain a good scrubbing...brush in one ear and out the other- repeat ten times, then switch ears and repeat. Now your almost done. A good brushing up each nostril ( you want to feel it poke the back of the skull) will complete the job.
After several of these, no IQ means no problems!
At least you replied before the goatse post!! *sh
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