A piece of middleware used in seemingly every single AAA game in the last decade... seems like a solid investment!<p>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: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi5adyccoKI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi5adyccoKI</a>
That's too bad. More people should invest in Bullet now: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_(software)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_(software)</a>
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.