Intel Sells Havok 3D Physics Engine To Microsoft

Microsoft has confirmed that it has bought physics engine Havok from Intel.

Over the course of its existence, Havok has worked with a wide variety of technology and gaming companies including Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony.

Despite the Havok engine and its tools becoming a wholly owned part of Microsoft, the company is still planning on licensing it out to partners, including Sony-developed games.

Microsoft has announced a new deal that will allow the company to acquire Havok, the well-known game tool creator, from Intel.

By Nick Pino Physics are a pretty important part of your favorite video games.

When reached for comment, a Microsoft representative told Gamasutra that “There will be no change to how Havok licenses its tech to game devs”.

However, what does this mean for third party studios who have used and are now contracting with Havok? According to the blog post, Microsoft is planning on implementing Havok physics into the Xbox One’s processing cloud – a feature that fans might see alongside Crackdown 3. As well as gaming, it is easy to foresee Havok’s technology being implemented in Hololens. Havok AI includes features such as navigation volumes, wall climbing support, streaming support, traversal analysis, dynamic cutting and many useful gameplay oriented features. Havok Script is significantly faster than standard Lua and through a combination of internal optimizations and use of the Havok Script profiler, customers typically achieve a 2x speed improvement. These tools and platforms components chiefly include DirectX 12, Visual Studio and Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft doesn’t plan to horde Havoks all to itself.