Blizzard Entertainment Licenses Havok 4.0

An interesting tidbit of information came from Havok's site recently that Blizzard Entertainment has licensed the latest version of the Havok physics engine. The first thought that sprang to my mind was Diablo 3, but who knows what Blizzard might have in store for us?

"Havok 4.0 will add power and flexibility to our development process," said Mike Morhaime, president and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment. "We're looking forward to utilizing this technology with our upcoming games."

Released in July this year, Havok 4.0 introduced two new products to the Havok product family - Havok Behavior, a system for developing event-driven character behaviors in a game, and Havok FX, a special effects software development kit that leverages Shader Model 3.0 class GPUs to enable tens of thousands of object collisions occurring in real-time, without putting additional burden on the CPU -, next to HydraCore, Havok Physics and Havok Animation. All Havok products are optimized for the widest range of platforms, including Sony's Playstation 3 console, Microsoft's 64bit Windows operating system, and now Apple Mac.

Jeff Yates, Havok's Vice President, Product Management commented: "The Mac is an important piece of technology and because of the cross-platform nature of Havok's technology, the port to Mac was easy to do. Furthermore, Blizzard Entertainment's commitment to OS X and to the Mac community is a good indication of the growth potential of the Mac as a games platform. Blizzard has always put out great games on the Mac, and we look forward to Havok becoming a part of that tradition."