http://www.havok.com/havok-to-join-microsoft/

Today, we are proud to announce that Microsoft has acquired Havok, the leading provider of 3D physics, from Intel.
As we welcome Havok to the Microsoft family, we will continue to work with developers to create great games experiences, and continue to license Havok’s development tools to third party partners. We believe that Havok is a fantastic addition to Microsoft’s existing tools and platform components for developers, including DirectX 12, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Azure.

So, are we going to see Havok's integration into VS for everyone? D:

If they are going to integrate Havok into XB1 dev kit looks quite obvious, but a DirectCompute implementation for DX11/12 developers would be great (and hopefully would force NVIDIA to offer a better non-CUDA implementation of physx).

Huh, that's pretty cool... yeah, a D3D12 compute implementation would be pretty swish

I'd be ok without a D3D11 version, a quick look at the Steam stats release recently show one hell of an uptake for D3D12/Win10.

Probably the more interesting speculation is Havoc optimized for running on Azure servers for games -- possibly distributed across machines for very large environments.

I'm curious what benefit Microsoft has in supporting a library that runs on every competitor of theirs? Kind of reminds me of nVidia's acquisition of PhysX.

I'm curious what benefit Microsoft has in supporting a library that runs on every competitor of theirs?

A pessimistic reply would be ensuring that updates for Windows happen first, or making versions for other OSes perform badly.

I'm curious what benefit Microsoft has in supporting a library that runs on every competitor of theirs?

Well, its a product, so presumably they'll sell it -- much like it is now, and also, I think, by integrating it with their offerings in cloud services -- if they can optimize it for use on Azure servers (which also power XBoxLive) and make it scale up, that's money in their pocket if it helps bring and keep customers on Azure.

I'm curious what benefit Microsoft has in supporting a library that runs on every competitor of theirs? :wink: Kind of reminds me of nVidia's acquisition of PhysX.

I wouldn't be too suprised if they drop PlayStation support... Which would be a complete shame.
MS has recently changed strategies, e.g. supporting iOS development instead of trying to wall in developers, so I hope not :)

Havok is more than just physics. They also have AI libraries, scripting libraries (a special implementation of of Lua iirc), and several other pieces of middleware that I forget.

So Microsoft is trying to build a large-scale cloud-gaming API everyone becomes dependent on, like a conceptual "Win32" for game development. Interesting.

I'm curious what benefit Microsoft has in supporting a library that runs on every competitor of theirs? Kind of reminds me of nVidia's acquisition of PhysX.

I wouldn't be too suprised if they drop PlayStation support... Which would be a complete shame.
MS has recently changed strategies, e.g. supporting iOS development instead of trying to wall in developers, so I hope not

"Havok will not be limited to Microsoft exclusively. “We will continue to license Havok’s technology to the broad AAA games industry," a representative told IGN. "This also means that we will continue to license Havok’s technology to run across various game consoles including Sony and Nintendo.”" - Havok / Microsoft representatives

A Microsoft-owned Azure-ran cross-platform game development API (possibly). If your game is cross-platform, Microsoft still gets paid. But with first-party support on XBone, it encourages XBone-first development, where Microsoft gets paid twice-over.

I wouldn't be too suprised if they drop PlayStation support... Which would be a complete shame.
MS has recently changed strategies, e.g. supporting iOS development instead of trying to wall in developers, so I hope not

A few years ago I might have had the same worry, but the current MS seems a little more open about these things, time will tell of course but unlike before I'm less inclined to believe the sky will fall ;)

Have to admit its weird seeing a bunch of people around the internet discuss your job. it has been a weird week But Im excited for my future anyway.