14 DAY TRIAL // Intel will distribute a PC version of its Havok Completephysics and animation software as a free download to developers who are building non-commercial applications and other products. The Havok Complete will be ready for download starting in May this year.
Havok Complete is Havok's core platform and is comprised of the Havok Physics engine and Havok Animation, a premium-class character animation software application. The Havok Complete platform is already a great success amongst the cross-platform AAA games developers, and is currently supporting more than 200 game titles. The free availability of the Havok Complete will allow the company to increase its market presence and will penetrate the market barrier that separated the company from a large amount of independent developers and academia.
"Havok has an excellent revenue base generated by sales of our three products across multiple platforms and into multiple industries," said David O'Meara, Managing Director at Havok. "This enables us to make an industry-changing move and opens up a much broader market for products such as Havok Behavior -- and our new products Havok Cloth and Havok Destruction -- that really come alive when adopted on top of our core platform, Havok Complete."
Moreover, the licensing agreement between Havok and its mother-company Intel stipulates that some approved game developers will be able to commercially distribute a PC creation executed with a free copy of the Havok Complete.
"Intel is very pleased to be sponsoring this direction in the PC market. This aligns well with our ongoing strategy of putting the best software tools in the hands of PC games developers," said Renee J. James, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Software and Solutions Group, Intel Corporation. However, this does not mean that the company will stop squeezing any revenue from the Havok platform. Havok will continue to sell copies of the Havok Complete framework to other hardware platforms as well as in the movie industry or in the professional gaming development sector.
"This is fantastic news for commercial PC game developers as well as the independent game development community, who will really benefit from this move," said Mark DeLoura, creator of the Game Programming Gems series. "It's great to see a leading middleware company like Havok show such support for PC game developers by making its physics and animation system freely available."