UPDATED: Diablo III to use new Havok physics engine

Posted at: 3:29pm 30th June 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Blizzard’s forthcoming Hellish RPG to use latest physics technology, including destructible environments, and it's rumoured to support DirectX 10.1 too

After the runaway success of World of Warcraft, many people thought that Blizzard’s devilish Diablo series of games had been pushed to the side, especially as the series hasn’t seen a release since the Diablo II expansion pack, Lord of Destruction, in 2001. However, Blizzard has answered the pleas of Diablo fans on Saturday, when it finally announced that is indeed working on Diablo III. Not only that, but that game will also support Havok physics.

Using a brand new graphics engine, Blizzard claims that Diablo III ‘can display characters and hordes of monsters in lush, fully 3D environments.’ As well as this, the developer promises that the game’s ‘powerful special-effects systems and Havok-powered physics allow the player to lay waste to the Hells' minions in spectacular ways.’

According to Blizzard, the new game engine ‘not only simulates advanced animation sequences and sound effects, but also uses a custom physics engine that allows for realistic object dynamics and cloth simulation.’ Based on Havok, the new physics engine is a bit of a blow for Nvidia which is currently pushing its recently acquired PhysX technology from Ageia. Meanwhile, Havok is now owned by Intel, although the company is now working with AMD towards getting the technology working on both AMD’s CPUs and GPUs.

We don’t know if Havok in Diablo III will be GPU-accelerated, and it’s more likely that it will be CPU-accelerated, given that Havok support on both Intel and AMD’s CPUs will make for much more widespread support. This is important if you want to have advanced physics features such as destructible environments that actually affect the game, and this is precisely what Blizzard has planned for Diablo III. ‘The game's physics-enhanced environments will be interactive and destructible,’ says the developer, ‘offering traps and obstacles that create added danger for players and monsters alike.’

The Diablo series have traditionally run on a wide range of graphics APIs in order to ensure widespread hardware support, and Diablo II even supported 3dfx’s proprietary GLide API, which was well past its use-by-date in 2000. However, Blizzard isn’t planning to alienate a load of potential players with its choice of API, and the game will also support DirectX 9 on Windows XP. In an interview on IGN, the Blizzard team said that ‘The team wants the game to be able to run on as broad a range of systems as possible. The game will not require DX10 to run.’

That said, there are a lot of rumours on the Web about the game supporting DirectX 10.1, as well as DirectX 9, adding extra graphical features for owners of supporting GPUs such as ATI's Radeon HD 3000 and 4000 series.