[uno7]

I remember when I first saw Havok in action (Half-Life 2 tech demos). It ushered in a new era in gaming. Things were expected to behave at least very close to reality. The way the developers described it back then made it seem like a revolution and I think it's easy for gamers these days to take that stuff for granted, since it is indeed "in pretty much every game ever".

Integrating it into Azure seems like a natural step for MS. I hope this ultimately means better environments for us to play in!

[gwern]

> Integrating it into Azure seems like a natural step for MS. I hope this ultimately means better environments for us to play in!

Could you explain that some more? I have to admit I don't immediately see what connection a physics library has with cloud hosting. How does some software for making balls bounce much more realistically connect with virtualized Linux & Windows OSes and hard drives?

[uno7]

This is the type of stuff that I mean: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/08/how-crackdown-3-uses-t...

http://www.cloudgine.com/technology.html

[asavadatti]

From the article:

""Microsoft is enabling players to go in and destroy skyscrapers and everything else in the world. That mode is only possible through the power of Azure, which means Crackdown 3 developers Sumo Digital and Cloudgine are building a cloud-based destruction engine that probably runs on Havok. Once that’s built, and now that Microsoft owns Havok, it could potentially license that destruction engine out to other developers.