TimeShift dev taking on Havok Destruction

TimeShift developer Saber Interactive has licensed Havok’s Destruction tool for several upcoming titles.

Havok Destruction, as implied by the title, is the middleware provider’s software tool used to craft simulations of rigid body destruction. The company says the software is being used to “punch holes in walls, buckle scaffolding, shatter windows, and even bend metal to create a truly dynamic and evolving cityscape.”

Saber Interactive – headquartered the US state of New Jersey with offices in St. Petersburg – has confirmed that Destruction is being used for its next title, though details on the game remain scarce.

“By implementing Havok Destruction, our team was able to easily and rapidly integrate large-scale destruction sequences, complex destructible objects, and events into the existing framework of our upcoming games that would have absorbed a much greater amount of development time and been nearly impossible to pull off without Havok,” said Andrey Iones, COO of Saber Interactive.

“Since integrating Havok Destruction, Saber’s art department has dramatically reduced the cost of generating destruction related assets. By utilizing Havok’s toolset, the artists are given full control over physics and destruction properties of various in-game objects and are able to do physics setup without the help of programmers. This has reduced our interactive asset generation budget by at least 40 per cent.”

David O’Meara, Havok’s Managing Director said that Havok is the “only technology solutions provider uniquely qualified and positioned to help our customers overcome the ongoing and evolving challenges facing development studios today.”

The Destruction tool is part of the Havok’s 6.5 product suite, which now also includes the company’s AI technology.