Back in August, Turbine licensed the Havok 6.0 Suite (Havok Physics, Havok Animation, Havok Behavior) which is a cross-platform toolset for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.
A few days ago Turbine also licensed Fork Particle’s Visual Effects Tool and SDK, again another cross-platform toolset that works on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.
Both tools will allow faster development time, and I’m a fan of Havok, having played several games using its physics engine. I’d love to see Turbine import both technologies into the engines of their existing games, but that would be a tremendous undertaking to retrofit an existing game with existing tech and animation frames into a whole new system. I won’t rule it out eventually, but I certainly won’t hold my breath for it anytime in the near future.
Turbine has stated they’re developing a MMOG that will work on consoles, but no information other than that. Could plugging cross-platform middleware into the Turbine Engine mean their new game will also be cross-platform and not console-only like some have assumed?
Tags: MMO
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Smart move. Their engine has been one of my pet peeves with their games.
Cool for a homegrown indie style of engine, but not for commercial purposes.
Adding in these tools make for a better overall feel I think (and fixes the most prevalent issue with Turbine games….animation)
Also, did you read about NCSoft licensing a culling engine used for Age of Conan for Guild Wars 2? Middleware rocks, and based on the visual quality of Conan, if they can go that route for GW2, and of course bring their game quality to the mix, GW2 may be truly tremendous!