Microsoft acquires Havok

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 &quot;prepare for unrealistic ragdolls&quot; 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:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Qi5adyccoKI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Qi5adyccoKI</a>

That&#x27;s too bad. More people should invest in Bullet now: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bullet_(software)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bullet_(software)</a>

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

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&#x27;s interesting that Intel seems to be selling off a lot of the acquisitions that they&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x27;s latest ventures into VR&#x2F;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 &#x2F; break it from running on Playstation and Nintendo consoles otherwise the cross platform developers would not be interested in using the middleware so I&#x27;m not sure what they are intending on doing.

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

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