Havok explains how its free Project Anarchy engine fits into its mobile strategy

okay so game over at the developer conference in brighton in england and i'm talking to haver which is interesting because we haven't really spoken to have because of mobile kind of games please introduce yourself that's what you do at havoc and that's why sure we're now interested in uh inhabit okay my name is andrew bowell i'm the head of product management for havoc so i'm a bit of an old timer been around since the early days um and done lots of different things but yeah very excited now to be part of the new initiative project anarchy which is havoc's big 4a into the mobile space so am i correct to use the term engine or do you prefer a different term no that's a good good term so we're basically a complete end-to-end engine for mobile so the big the big news is we're entirely free to ship on ios android and tizen um and free as well to develop on pc using basically the same engine um at a kind of dx9 level so kind of mobile friendly level and i guess the big news

is back in the day we knew the physics engine and then apk animation ai or pretty much everything we needed to make very high quality console games yes so you are you giving these poor learner driver mobile developers ferrari are they gonna are they gonna get a deal with the power you give well first of all we think they're they're probably the ones driving the ferraris these days but um yeah absolutely no i mean i think that the tech that they're getting is is really really great stuff um i mean it's basically being tried and tested out there for you know for many of the year in big titles sort of physics from uncharted the ai from halo 4 the animation from skyrim and this this is tech which we've basically optimized for mobile we've taken the same tools the same runtime and basically put into a package with with the engine and made that available to people so i mean we're really really excited to see what they're going to do well this is it free as in beer well i mean listen the the goal here is to build a community and the best way to build community give them something free and

they'll certainly come and help us build that now there's a there's a an upgrade path so people can pro if you like gopro um and that that basically will allow them to get more uh source code which is obviously a nice thing and get direct support from havoc havoc's really well known for its uh support and get more products so we have things like destruction and cloth which kind of are the i suppose next added extra and you know we'll see um i think over time how you know the as the mobile platforms develop get more powerful i think that'll be a very interesting uh upgrade for people so don't be too controversial about this but obviously there's a uh a well-known uh danish company that the opposite lego is a i don't know i mean obviously yeah i mean there's other companies have been doing this of course yeah tours for a while i mean are you in competition with them is the market big enough some developers use a bit of everything i i think there's room for for different approaches in the space basically i mean havoc's approach and we've touched on already is coming

from a background of aaa development and you know providing sort of runtime technology um i think the community will take it i think it'll take um you know we'll see the base of the fruits of the laborers over the next few months i think there's there's definitely room for another um engine out there and um you know we're here for the long term so that's the that's the main piece i guess the other thing i should say with my talking ferraris i mean you you have lots of kind of easy tools and you're kind of you know you don't need to use no c plus plus to use kind of um the toolkit yeah absolutely so i mean there's basically lots of different ways to interact um you could you know see plus is absolutely available to people who want to get down and dirty kind of get the nuts and bolts off the the engine if they like and go in and play around with it but absolutely you can sit in the driver's seat and just use lua which is the the main scripting language that we have um you can also you can configure things pretty nicely so there's a sort of full multi-user environment so you can have your artists essentially using a wysiwyg

editor to set up the scene using basically prefabricated objects that have all the properties so you can have your vehicle basically fully rigged that artists can just go in and play around with in place and they don't need any programming experience to do that excellent thanks for your time yeah absolutely