Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) announced that it has reached an agreement with AGEIA Technologies and Havok in order to include versions of their products in the PS3 SDKs. For those of you not familiar with the two companies, Havok is a physics engine provider based in Dublin, Ireland and San Francisco and responsible for the physics in a variety of games, including Half - Life 2; while AGEIA Technologies is a physics tool and hardware developer based in California, U.S.A and has its physics showcased in a variety of game engines including Unreal Engine 3.
This development puts Sony's next-generation console in a very powerfull position as it has secured the products and support of the two main innovators in in-game physics today.
Through this agreement with AGEIA, SCEI obtains sublicensing rights of the AGEIA PhysX SDK (also known as NovodeX), a physics library developed by AGEIA.
The AGEIA PhysX SDK featues multi-threaded capability making the AGEIA PhysX SDK ideally equipped to leverage the power of the Cell processor. The licensing agreement allows for SCEI and AGEIA to optimize the AGEIA PhysX SDK for utilization in PS 3, and will be included in the Software Development Kit for PLAYSTATION 3. Frontline support will be provided by SCEI.
Through the Havok agreement, SCEI obtains sublicensing rights of physics and animation engines for PS 3 as well as the related content and debugging tools developed by Havok.
Havok utilizes various factors that exist in the real world, such as gravity, collision, friction and other dynamic forces and blends them seamlessly with physically-based character animation rendering their images swiftly in real-time. Through the licensing agreement, optimized Playstation 3 libraries of Havok's physics and animation engines as well as a wealth of tools, including linkers and debuggers, will be included as one total solution in the Software Development Kit for PS 3. Again frontline support will be provided by SCEI.