Card Kingdom is a 3D arena-style brawler where the player controls an anthropomorphized playing card that defeats overwhelming numbers of zombified cards raised by the evil Joker to conquer Card Kingdom.
Tag Archives: Havok
I posted the following on the Card Kingdom development blog.
Two features of Havok Physics that we will be using for this game are the character controller and phantom collisions. The character controller is used, as the name suggests, to control a physical body as user controlled object. It handles the various states a character can be in: on the group, wanting to jump, in the air, climbing a ladder, flying, etc. It also supports custom states as well, so crouching, swimming, any state that the physical representation of the body needs act differently in, it handles.
I posted the following on the Card Kingdom development blog.
Integrating Havok into our engine has been a slow, arduous, yet rewarding experience. The main feature that makes Havok such an ideal solution are the tools. Exporters for common 3D modeling programs, preview tools and visual debuggers make the development process a much more pleasant experience. Without these tools, we would have to rely on our engine, which is still a work in progress.
New models, animations, physics interactions and property tweaks would have to be tested in the engine with massive amounts of debug information displayed. The process for testing would be: model or code, export, import into the engine, maybe recompile the engine, run the application, test, find errors, make adjustments, repeat. That process is time consuming and unproductive.
I posted the following on the Card Kingdom development blog.
This week I will be working on integrating Havok Physics into our engine. Our previous engine used Newton Dynamics, of which I have previous experience with on other projects. I hadn’t used it in a while before the previous engine so I had to get reacquainted with the API. It hadn’t changed much on the outside, but how physical interactions and materials worked was completely new. In the end, I managed to wrap Newton in a logical and useful way.
Havok and Newton share many of the same concepts, but their implementations could not be more different. Newton is a C API, with discrete functions for handling all aspects of the system, while Havok is a C++/object oriented approach. The more I learn about Havok, the more I appreciate Newton for its relative simplicity. I’ve only scratched the surface of the iceberg that is Havok physics.