Most gamers and video game developers know more or less what is Havok engine. Beside physics simulation and collision detection, Havok offers many other features, like animation, realistic cloth or dynamic destruction of rigid bodies. Being cross platform middleware, Havok is used in pretty large number of video game titles: from PC’s Painkiller, PSP Killzone: Liberation to Assassin’s Creed, Dead Space or Fallout 3 on modern video game systems. Best thing – you can try it for free and use it in your home-made game or demo application. After registration on Havok site, you get binary bundle featuring standard Havok Physics and Havok Animation products.
It could be hard for one to instantly “jump in” and create a simulation using Havok. Provided documentation is excellent and there are Havok software engineers on Intel Software Network to help and answer questions, but the SDK and it’s range of features are huge. Therefore I would like to write some tutorials or helpers about starting with Havok Physics 6.5.0. I believe that beside official support, it’s hard to find such information elsewhere, so hopefully it will help someone (or not, anyway – I’m going to write something).
Tutorial is intended for C++ developers, not artits or modellers (you can also use Havok in 3D modelling applications, like 3ds max), so you should have basic C++ skills and Microsoft Visual C++ IDE. I will present how to setup and link libraries, initialize Havok, create a flat surface and preview it in Visual Debugger. Of course all of it can be found in documentation and demos added to SDK, but I’ll try to compact everything here. Continue to tutorial with following link:
