
Microsoft acquires Havok - varunagrawal
http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2015/10/02/havok-to-join-microsoft/
======
brobinson
A piece of middleware used in seemingly every single AAA game in the last
decade... seems like a solid investment!

That said, when I see a Havok splash screen when a game is launching, it means
"prepare for unrealistic ragdolls" to me. I wish they would tone down how
loose the physics on ragdolls are and end up with something more like this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi5adyccoKI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi5adyccoKI)

~~~
Animats
That's a consequence of using impulse-constraint contact simulation on
ragdolls. If you use spring-damper contact simulation, the motion is better,
but the compute cost is higher. Impulse-constraint simulations have
instantaneous velocity changes, which looks wrong for large objects. I call
this the "boink" problem. Here's what it looks like with nonlinear spring-
damper contact simulation.[1][2]

I did those animations back in 1996-1997. Havok licensed the patent rights
from me, but switched over to impulse-constraint because it was faster and
could be done on the 32-bit FPUs of game consoles. Spring-damper simulation
has a reputation for failing badly under high forces ("Trespasser", an early
Jurassic Park game, was a disaster because of this), but I figured out how to
fix that. (You have to use nonlinear simulated springs, and then, having
created an insanely stiff system of differential equations, figure out how to
integrate them. This can be done well, but it's hard to do it in fixed time,
which is a problem for games.)

Havok didn't do too well in their first years. They overexpanded, more or less
went broke, a new group of investors and management took over and downsized,
and a few years later the new investors exited by selling the company to
Intel. The founders didn't come out of it very well.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lHqEwk7YHs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lHqEwk7YHs)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DaWIHc1VLY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DaWIHc1VLY)

~~~
santaclaus
> That's a consequence of using impulse-constraint contact simulation on
> ragdolls.

Why is that the case? If I recall Erwin Coumans now has generalized coordinate
articulated bodies in Bullet, which uses an LCP based impulse system.

~~~
Animats
Because, in an impulse-constraint system, all bounces happen instantaneously.
An impulse is an infinite force applied over zero time but with a finite
energy transfer product. This results in an infinite acceleration over zero
time, with a finite change in the velocity vector. That's not how the
macroscopic universe works. It doesn't properly model a combined impact/skin
compress/slide/skin expand/bounce situation for heavy objects, which is not
instantaneous.. This shows. It's why objects banging around in video games all
seem to be too light.

A better model is to use compressible "skin" over incompressible "bones",
which is what Falling Bodies did.

------
shmerl
That's too bad. More people should invest in Bullet now:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_\(software\))

~~~
blencdr
wow... does it mean that anything microsoft touches is ruined just "because
microsoft" ?

~~~
greggman
Microsoft is in direct competition with Sony (XboxOne vs PS4). Also less less
directly with Mac vs Windows, iOS+Android vs Windows Phone. I say less because
this is about a physics engine used in games. XboxOne and PS4 are game
machines where as those other platform have much broader interests.

If Microsoft either stops supporting non-MS platform or makes them 2nd class
(new features first appear on MS platform) then yes, this is a huge problem.

Remember when EA bought Renderware back when tons of game studios were using
it? GTA3 was written with it. Where is Renderware now?

It's certainly possible nothing will change but it's just as possible the
glaring conflict of interest will influence things badly.

~~~
dclowd9901
All this means is that MS is hedging their investments. Now for every dollar a
Sony game makes (that has the Havok engine), MS is going to get a cut.

It may be that Sony willingly boxes out MS by going with another engine, but
the games industry doesn't seem that bitter.

~~~
Narishma
Sony has nothing to do with this. It's the game developers who use the engine.

~~~
dclowd9901
Yes, and Sony produces games, and also entices developers to create
exclusives. Those possibly use Havok and Sony may ask exclusives developers
not to license it.

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reitanqild
Hopefully now that MS has changed Havok will continue to work on Linux. 10
years ago this would have been worrying.

~~~
shmerl
I doubt MS changed much when it comes to gaming. They still push their lock-in
and didn't even join Vulkan working group (which is all about collaborative
industry effort). So anything gaming related that they buy is a reason to
worry.

~~~
nivla
That would explain why Minecraft is unplayable on PS4 ever since the
acquisition. /s

Microsoft has the same amount of reasons to "ban" Sony as Apple has to "ban"
Samsung. Despite the lawsuits and disagreement Apple still buys a lot of their
chips (including their core processor [1]) from Samsung because at the end of
the day business is business!

[1] [http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/mobile-
devices/samsung...](http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/mobile-
devices/samsung-supplying-apples-a9-processor-for-next-iphone/a/d-id/1319766)

~~~
shmerl
Sure, wait until Xbox only stuff will appear in it. Don't complain then that
you weren't warned.

And FYI, Minecraft was never uniformly supported on all platforms to begin
with. Some always had more features than others.

------
partiallypro
I imagine this is two things for Microsoft: An investment to bolster DirectX
and a cloud investment. Microsoft has shown that it wants to push physics
calculations into the cloud. They have a pretty incredible demo displaying it,
and it will be used for Crackdown. I can only suspect that they will want
other dev shops to start utilizing this as it can bolster Azure.

~~~
simoncion
> Microsoft has shown that it wants to push physics calculations into the
> cloud.

Ugh. Yet _another_ excuse for publishers to retain the ability to shut off
single-player games some single-digit-number of years after release. :(

Don't get me wrong, I've wanted new and better physics ever since Max Payne 2.
Except for some niche games whose names I have forgotten ( :( ), we haven't
_really_ gotten good physics yet.

------
imroot
It's interesting that Intel seems to be selling off a lot of the acquisitions
that they've acquired in the last few years -- first Mashery and now Havok. I
wonder if this is a change of direction from Intel to go back to the
chipset/foundry business.

~~~
bjwbell
My guess it's the new CEO at Intel, Brian Krzanich, he was previously head of
the manufacturing division. The previous CEO was from marketing.

------
venomsnake
Ahhh the piece of software that brought us the best weapon in game ever - the
Painkiller stake gun. Impaling zombies on the walls with it was awesome. Good
for them.

~~~
rasz_pl
You mean Half-Life gravity gun?

~~~
DiabloD3
You mean any given gun in Reflex?

------
iraphael
This seems obviously correlated with the gaming side of MS. But I wonder if
this acquisition is also related to MS's latest ventures into VR/AR, something
that a lot of big companies seem to be doing right now. I hope Havok makes
HoloLens a great product because I want that thing on my face.

------
ajeet_dhaliwal
It would be unwise to stop / break it from running on Playstation and Nintendo
consoles otherwise the cross platform developers would not be interested in
using the middleware so I'm not sure what they are intending on doing.

------
artnep
Can anyone comment on current pros and cons of Havok vs PhysX (which was open-
sourced recently by NVIDIA)?

~~~
0xcde4c3db
The "open-sourcing" of PhysX has been widely misreported. It is still
proprietary. The source is on GitHub, but it's only available to developers
with a GameWorks account and isn't under a FOSS license.

~~~
dogma1138
It costs nothing to register, but the sources aren't for PhysX they are for
the SDK and samples.

The GameWorks source code isn't even available to most big developers you need
a really special relationship with the green giant to get access to it.

~~~
maccard
If the source for the SDK is available, what part of PhysX isn't available?
All of their core algorithms and solvers are available, although the Flex
source code isn't available. Game works is another kettle of fish thigh.

~~~
dogma1138
Not all solvers are available, GPU solver's aren't, FLEX and APEX are also
currently not available. FLEX source won't be released as far as i can tell
APEX will be released in some form or another in the future. The basic CPU
solvers are there, but the license doesn't really allows you to modify them
anyhow.

------
rasz_pl
I hope they include it in next DirectX, and it kills Nvidia scam called PhysX.

~~~
barranger
Don't know anything about PhysX, but I'd imagine they would. I'd also imagine
that they'll start building in support for their cloud based physics as used
in the upcoming Crackdown 3

~~~
rasz_pl
cloud based physics?? That is an oxymoron, physics is something happening
right now, there is no room for latency due to streaming from the server,
unless you want rubberbanding.

