Havok Studios announced today that the latest version of their groundbreaking design tool, Havok 5, is ready for developers. Piggybacking off of their Havok Physics and Havok Animation, Havok 5 has not only brought "major new features", but also the introduction of Havok Behavior.

A lot of gamers or patrons of the industry might not know the details of Havok's gaming engine, so we'll try to get everyone on the same page. Here are some details taken from the press release:

Havok Physics™ 5 provides significant memory and CPU performance improvements that can dramatically accelerate interactive destruction sequences in games. This release also provides enhanced memory limiting and reporting across all platforms, and adds Wii™ support for Havok’s innovative Visual Debugger, strengthening Havok’s comprehensive offering of cross-platform performance diagnostic tools.

Havok Animation™ 5 establishes an industry-first with its new run-time mirroring feature, allowing character animations to be reflected interactively from left to right – cutting content creation and memory requirements in half for directional animation assets. This release also provides compression enhancements that reduce the memory required to store arbitrary character animations by as much as 25% over previous releases.

Havok Behavior ™5 takes interactive character behavior authoring to a new level, by establishing the first unified authoring environment and SDK that intuitively combines the power of physics with procedural animation and traditional animation assets. The power and utility of this unique system empowers game developers and artists alike, accelerating production 10-fold, and opening the door to hybrid character performances that have never been seen before.

All in all Havok 5 seems like the pinnacle of game development platforms and should produce some quality games for all platforms. CEO of Havok, David O'Mera, went on to say, "With our commitment to aiding developers to create more fun and realistic games, more economically, Havok 5 is creating great excitement amongst our customer base and is currently being used in the development of dozens of 'Triple A' game titles."

"Havok has become a one stop shop for cross-platform, professionally supported first class technology solutions for the industry." Could this be the solution to simplifying the cross platform gaming discrepancies between Xbox and the PS3?

Stay tuned to PSU for more information from Havok and games that utilize their design platform.

Source: Havok