Once again those fine chumps who bring my my daily addiction, Blizzard Entertainment, through collaboration will be bringing Havok to the Mac.

article here: http://www.havok.com/content/view/371/53/

My opinion: shoulda been done a long time ago. I feel that there are several better alternatives for the mac now (aegia comes to mind), but with blizzard leading the way for mac games (subjective opinion), Havok could really make gainway.

And I also suggest that half life will STILL never come to the mac platform.

It's great news to hear that another industry-leading middleware brand is coming over! Man, Havok is in at least half of the Xbox 360 games I've played in the last few months. Now we just need SpeedTree, which is the other major middleware I've been seeing plastered all over the place.

I also agree that Half-Life 2 will NEVER be on the Mac. Heck, I think half of Valve originally came from Microsoft (I'm not joking).

BTW, is Aegia available to anyone else on the Mac except Unity yet?

I wonder if they'll bother to make a full universal port or just Intel...

PowerMacX Wrote:I wonder if they'll bother to make a full universal port or just Intel...

They've already got code that runs on PPC so I don't see why not, though I suppose it's up to Blizzard at this point.

I think the only thing that precluded Havok coming to the Mac sooner was money - as in Aspyr and friends couldn't afford to port games that used Havoc due to exorbitant licensing fees. Blizzard/Vivendi probably got a deal, but they develop for multiple platforms and can absorb the cost regardless.

It's really not that big of news IMO, for the reasons Frank pointed out.

Unless there are details to the licensing that haven't been revealed, this changes nothing. It would have been better for Macs in the long run if Blizzard had gone with Ageia.

I suppose there is a tiny chance, that, having made back some or all of the development cost from the Mac version of Havok, the developer will feel able to lower the price. But I suspect that they will instead hold out for the next publisher with deep pockets.

Just my opinion.

I'm betting the cost was maybe around a few thousand bucks, tops.

ryan hates it when people talk about themselves in third person...

seriously though, will this affect us indie devs? I mean, I'm happy with newton, (though that feels like it's geared toward science, not gaming...), and I won't spend a thousand bucks for another engine.

FreakSoftware Wrote:I'm betting the cost was maybe around a few thousand bucks, tops.

Last I heard Havok was in the $50K - $80K range for a single title (more or less, depending on which Havok products you're licensing). Blizzard probably worked out a royalty deal due to their high sales volume.

Frank C. Wrote:Last I heard Havok was in the $50K - $80K range for a single title (more or less, depending on which Havok products you're licensing). Blizzard probably worked out a royalty deal due to their high sales volume.

No, I mean the cost to build it for the Mac. The president of the company even championed their tools and code and said it was "easy" to do it. It's surely more work than clicking a checkbox, but I can't imagine it taking more than a couple days to get working.

The number I've heard for licensing was "hundreds of thousands" of dollars.