Physics and character animation middleware company Havok has announced that it is developing Hydracore, a new element included in its next-generation middleware that, according to the company, "will help developers leverage the built-in power and scalability of multi-core and multi-threaded next generation game platforms from manufacturers like AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and Sony Computer Entertainment Inc."
According to the firm, Hydracore will allow game developers to flexibly assign and remove threads from the computationally-heavy tasks that next-generation games will require – from computing physics simulations for dynamic and destructible worlds, to helping game characters respond more intelligently to each other and their environments. HydraCore accelerates these elements of gameplay by dividing up the work load and dispatching it to any number of central or secondary processing units.
"The face of gaming will change significantly in the next two years, as the computational power available to PC and video game players takes another huge step forward," said Jeff Yates, VP of Product Management for Havok. “Havok’s HydraCore™ software technology is designed to help game developers tap into the true power of these systems, by distributing real-time computation of physics and character animations flexibly and evenly across multiple processors."
According to the company's website, the HydraCore Technology will be provided as a core component of all next-generation Havok products, including the Havok Physics game physics SDK and the Havok Complete physics/integrated animation system, and will be integrated into those products as standard.
