So in the last entry I showed the remote visual debugger that Havok lets you play around with, it's very cool. Today I have an update showing some in-game images and a video. The vid/screens show implementation of a 32bit sampled heightfield in Havok, as well as standard rigid bodies ( little boxes in this case ). Vehicles are also implemented but aren't ready to be shown yet :-D

Also some may be wondering why I've switched physics libraries...I'd really rather not say specifics about each library, but it seems as most of them would force you to represent your terrain mesh as a triangulated shape. Havok is the only physics lib I've seen [ I've not used Bullet, or a few others ] that allows these kinds of heightfields and the associated optimizations. PhysX [ 2.5 or 2.6 I think ] was the last physics library I fully implemented, it just IDLED at 20 FPS with 50,000 triangles in the terrain, and no objects spawned....Havok can handle 'heightfields' of 16000x16000 which is really amazing. The others like ODE, Tokamak, etc were a little too 'low level' and lacking the sorts of advanced/convenience features of a physics library like Havok, PhysX, or Newton. I have not talked about Newton yet, but IMO it handled large static terrains much better than PhysX it seemed. Though it is amazingly easy to use and has a lot of great features like Havok/PhysX [ easy encapsulated vehicles, etc. ] it seemed to lack general stability back when I was using it [ version 1.5 ...it was a long time ago ]. I've spent some time checking out Newton 2.0, and it looks very promising.

Still, I'm sure there could have been some special library specific optimizations that I could have missed, paging of physics terrains, etc...but why even deal with all that when Havok spoon feeds it to you, and it works perfectly, and painlessly. It seems a little too good to be true, especially since some commercial games have used Havok's vehicles 'right out of the box' to quote from the Havok docs :-D

Here is the preview image of the video, showing the 512x512 heightfield (500,000+ triangles), and a few 100 dynamic rigid bodies.

">Click here to view the video on YouTube

Or click the image....

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This all works with 100% support from the visual debugger as the scene is running on one machine, I can view properties of it on another computer on the network.

That's my little update for tonight...phew, time to take a snapshot of everything and relax with a few brewskies :-D

- Danny