July 20, 2008 6:40 AM PDT
Questions regarding Havok 6.0.0
I have a few simple questions regarding the new Havok 6.0.0 release. I am currently trying to start on programming as a hobby. When 'goggling', I found "XNA game studio express" the simplest solution, but to further continue on my project, I need a physics engine. I am currently suffering from major limitations from BEPUphysics, though it's a great engine.
Will the next Havok engines have support for managed C#? and / or Do you plan releasing the engine in 2008 or later?
Me and someone else are actively developing a wrapper for using Havok in C#. So far we have gotten a majority of the rigid body system ( all rigid body primitives triangle meshes and such ) and working on stuff like joints and character controllers. We should have a first release soon. Well, I did release it before but that was very premature. It has matured much since the first release.
Does it will have support for Blender? Hope Havok 6 will have support for Blender. Considering havok is free for non-commercial release and Blender is Open source project, it will have benefit for both side.
Why didn't support Blender? Example, someone can't afford maya or 3dsmax and using blender for modelling and want to using Havok for physic engine, because havok is known for fast and ease to use. Please add support for Blender, I try to not use illegal software, so i use Blender. Sorry before that.
I'm sure a lot of why they don't has to do with: -3ds max, XSI, and Maya are the most commonly used 3d modeling and animating software for developers. -With this fact known, its only logical to target these three modeling/animating behemoths. And also, Havok wasn't always free, and I'm sure its commercial license costs a ton, so they assume most developers would have one of those three.
Those are just my assumptions. I could easily be wrong as to their reasons.
But, if people want to use Havok they must have Maya or 3DsMax, which is every license cost 5000 US Dollar. I'm curios does Maya 8.5 Personal License Edition is supported? Blender also widely used by small developer or indie developer, where they didn't have enough money to buy Maya or 3DsMax. Please suppoer Blender. What Havok 6 offer than Havok 5.5? Is it have new features? Like better Soft body physic, Finite Element Analysis or semi-Finite Element Analysis?
Regarding support for Blender (or any other content creation tools)...
We realize this is a popular request, but from a resource standpoint, we are not set up to go after Blender support. That is not to say we are against it at all, but just needing to prioritize how we focus our resources. Blender's a great tool and hopefully someone out there can take a crack at maybe converting from its format into the Havok XML output format that is generated by the Havok Content Tools currently supported in max/maya/xsi. It's perhaps not the most elegant approach, but would open a path for basic stuff that could work for a specific version of Havok (e.g. 5.5).
You can use Softimage's Modtool, witch is basically a stripped down version of XSI. It is tested/working and the best thing is that ModTool is free, just like blender, although the licensing might differ. It also has great xna support.
The nicest solution would be to write a Blender scene exporter which integrates with the Blender UI but would be a lot of work, especially without access to the SDK source code.
The simplest way, which is what Jeff mentioned, was to convert a Blender/Blender-compatible file to a Havok HKX file (XML format). I believe there's a COLLADA exporter for Blender which allows you export physics geometry. You could use/make a COLLADA->HKX converter then to get your scene into Havok. I believe Erwin Coumans has done some work on this.
