Havok Physics Based Spin Tires Makes Off Road Driving More Realistic And Very Difficult

• January 3, 2010
• Written by Mark
• 5 Comments
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Spin Tires is a game demo that was submitted to the Intel’s Level Up 2009 Contest this past year. Spin Tires heavily relies on the Havok Physics Engine. Spin Tires features deformable terrain that can simulate a vehicle being stuck in mud or getting stuck in any kind off road condition. If you visit the Spin Tires website it has a nice interactive area showing and explaining different off road scenarios that could be encountered and simulated with Spin Tires along with real world videos of actual off roading and driving in mud showing what Spin Tires could bring to video games.

Check out the videos below and visit the Spin Tires website to see for yourself the possibilities this could bring to games, more realistic off road gaming and simulating being stuck in mud could really bring some cool and realistic gameplay to racing games and military games. Imagine a military game where off road driving could only be accomplished by certain vehicles or a vehicle got stuck and you needed a recovery vehicle to pull it out, the possibilities are endless.

The actual playable demo is also available on the Spin Tires web site you can download it here.

From the Intel Software Network Sping Tires Demo Page:

Game Demo Description

Spin Tires is an off-road racing game, which is simulated by Havok Physics library.
It features extrudable terrain, which is perturbed by tires of your truck when they spin. This produces unmatched gaming experience.
If you take a look at media files, you shall notice terrain plants, which are all completely interactive and destructible.
So how does the game qualify in categories?

- Best Game Optimized for Intel Graphics:
Spin Tires uses its own graphics engine, which is specifically tuned for GMA. In fact, the engine has two modes, one of which runs without advanced special effects, while the other targets more powerfull videocards.

- Best Threaded Game:
Two heavy computing tasks currently present in Spin Tires: physics simulation and terrain modification (which includes painting, subdividing, and extruding terrain).
Havok, as physics library, performs simulation in multithreaded mode.
Apart from this, Spin Tires use arbitrary amount of additional threads to perform terrain subdivision and extrusion, and texture compression. These operations are piplened into worker threads.