INTEL-OWNED Irish software firm Havok is actively considering establishing a new development centre outside of Ireland due to the lack of talented software engineers in the country.
Chief executive David O’Meara also says the company is being “aggressively” courted by development agencies in Canada and Singapore who want Havok to invest in their countries.
The budget is already assigned to begin development for the new Havok product this year, but it looks increasingly like the team working on it will be based overseas. “The decision on where to locate will be a pure hardnosed business decision,” says O’Meara.
Havok, which won an Emmy award last year for its physics engine software which adds realism to computer games, has continued to develop products in Ireland even though O’Meara says costs are high and talent is hard to get.
“Both of our latest products, Cloth and Destruction, have been developed in Ireland, which is very difficult to do those days given the quality of the graduate output,” says O’Meara. “The country does not have enough people of the calibre we need, so we have to do some work overseas”.
The firm currently has development centres in Munich and San Francisco and will add a development function to its Japanese office shortly.
He also points out that rent for the company’s downtown San Francisco is less than that in the Digital Hub in Dublin’s Liberties. But O’Meara says costs “are not an inhibitor to doing business in Ireland” provided he can hire the staff he needs.
O’Meara believes the blame lays partly with the third-level institutions. Havok grew out of research in Trinity College 10 years ago, but he points out that it is no longer considered one of the best technical universities in Europe.
“If we want a smart economy, it is the top 5 per cent of graduates that create the knowledge – we have to be worried about them, not the average student,” says O’Meara. “If you get less than 350 points in the Leaving Cert, I would question if you have the cognitive ability to do engineering at third level.”
Launched last year at a major game developer conference in the US, both Cloth and Destruction are gaining strong traction with games studios.
This spring UFC 2009 Undisputed, a mixed martial arts game developed in Japan and published by THQ, will be the first commercial release to feature Cloth, which O’Meara says has had “the fastest take-up of any product in the games industry”.
Cloth adds realism to objects in games such as clothing, flags and other items, by making them obey the laws of fluid dynamic. It frees up developers from having to animate those movements. It will add additional realism to games but, as Dave Gargan, a principal engineer with Havok points out, it will also see a move away from the tendency of game characters to have tight clothing and short hair.
Destruction is aimed at the action games sector and adds detail to explosions and other scenes where items are destroyed.
Destruction has to be used at an earlier stage of game development – which takes about two years for a console title – and so titles featuring it won’t appear until the end of the year.
A demo of the technology for The Irish Times this week showed dust particles, sparks and other debris flying through the air as a wooden bridge carrying a train over a valley was shot down.
“We actually have to tone down the realism, as people are used to seeing explosions in cinema, not as they really happen,” says Gargan.
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