Introduction

The Havok Xtra is a fully integrated rigid body physics simulation engine for Macromedia Director. The Havok Xtra provides complete access to physical properties and events giving you complete control over their simulated world. It enables you to assign properties such as mass and elasticity to physical objects, apply forces, impulses or torques and set velocities and momentum. You can also register interest in specific rigid body collisions or even disable them completely. Support is provided for importing Havok HKE (Havok Exporter) files, which allow full physics scenes to be constructed in a 3D modeler (like 3ds max) without requiring additional Lingo scripts.

The Havok Xtra comes with a library of behaviors to simplify the creation of physics scenes and a series of demos highlighting the many powerful features of the engine.

A Havok cast member contains all information required to turn a static 3D world into a dynamic physical simulated one. Each Havok cast member is linked to a Director 3D cast member. No sprites need to be created directly from a Havok cast member as the dynamic world is seen through a 3D sprite.

There are a number of stages in setting up and updating a Havok controlled 3D world:

• Initialization including creation of rigid bodies
• Applying external inputs to the simulation like forces, torques etc.
• Stepping - perform simulation and advance the world to a new time.
• Shutdown.

This quick start guide covers the core functionality of the Havok Xtra. It assumes a basic understanding of Macromedia Director and its Lingo scripting language. We will create a simple scene with physical properties, introducing the main building blocks along the way. For more information on working with the Havok Xtra you should consult the Havok Xtra Lingo Reference Guide and Havok Xtra Behavior Reference Guide and many other documents and examples available on the Havok Xtra developer site.