I posted the following on the Card Kingdom development blog.
This week I will be working on integrating Havok Physics into our engine. Our previous engine used Newton Dynamics, of which I have previous experience with on other projects. I hadn’t used it in a while before the previous engine so I had to get reacquainted with the API. It hadn’t changed much on the outside, but how physical interactions and materials worked was completely new. In the end, I managed to wrap Newton in a logical and useful way.
Havok and Newton share many of the same concepts, but their implementations could not be more different. Newton is a C API, with discrete functions for handling all aspects of the system, while Havok is a C++/object oriented approach. The more I learn about Havok, the more I appreciate Newton for its relative simplicity. I’ve only scratched the surface of the iceberg that is Havok physics.
