Feature: 'Havok Your Way: Havok's Jeff Yates'

In the latest exclusive Gamasutra interview, we speak to Havok exec Jeff Yates about the company's physics solution (as used in Half-Life 2, Dead Rising, & MotorStorm) its new animation SDK and Behavior tool, and the challenges of PS3 and Xbox 360 cross-platform development. In this excerpt, Yates talks about the different ways developers can use Havok's blends along with newer processes starting to emerge with procedural animation to create more lifelife reactions from in-game characters: “GS: Will it be possible in the future for scripted animations (such as idle animations) to feature slight variations? Right now they’re generally looped canned animations. JY: Right now I think there are a lot of clever things you can do with blends. There are a couple of approaches to that. The extreme one is to have eight different ways the character might idle, then support random selection, so you can pick a different one every time and get randomization that way. That's a bit brute force, but surprisingly effective, because you know exactly how long it will take, and how much memory it will take in advance. Another approach that is a little less explicit is to have extreme ranges of motion, then blending those and having a variable that modulates. For example, if the AI is tired, maybe his arms will come down a little bit and then raise up. We try to enable that by letting you put variables on these blends. I think full procedural stuff is even cooler. It's most doable for the upper body. Full procedural locomotion for the base of the body and for momentum and stuff like that is just now starting to come out into the open. GS: Is that going to be difficult to blend into other animations? JY: Yeah. I tend to sometimes think about procedural textures when I think about this stuff. They held so much promise, and then people saw that they had like twenty variables that all had to be tuned and simulated. It really depends. I think that almost anything that you look at - either through runtime or 3D authoring - the algorithms you choose have to be very predictable. To be honest, we haven't really tackled that part of the equation yet. But I think anyone can plug it in.” You can now read the full Gamasutra feature with much more from Yates on Havok's competition and how it tackles cross-platform issues (no registration required, please feel free to link to this column from external websites).