Tools company interviews generally aren't _that_ riveting, but I did appreciate colleague Brandon Sheffield's interview with Havok's Jeff Yates on Gamasutra - the physics engine is seen in games like Half-Life 2, Dead Rising, and MotorStorm, but this conversation was a bit more wideranging than just bouncy boxes.

Havok is diversifying into animation and other tools, but my favorite question is after Brandon mentions that having a fixed simulated physics world would be a shame, because he 'loves breaking games' - and he does, folks!

Yates notes: "I think that the more people who aspire from a development standpoint for complexity, the more ways there will be to break stuff, especially with procedural animations. Everybody wants emergent results, but when you get that, you actually have a very hard time testing it. It's a very serious practicality issue that everybody is facing. Ragdoll and physics are the same way. You can stack things up and get out of a game's world! It's pretty wild. Somebody should design a game based entirely around that premise."

Oddly, this is more or less exactly what Brandon does at every game showcase he visits, the adorable scamp. Games broken by Mr. Sheffield in the past 3 months include Crysis and Lair.

Also very notable is talk about Xbox 360 to PlayStation 3 conversion: "It's changing for sure. I think the PS3 has great potential, but it's a very different kind of architecture. If people build their games with an understanding of what their challenges are going to be with porting between consoles, we can do a lot. In some cases, though, we're seeing people start with a 360 SKU and defer thinking about the PS3 port later. That can have some pretty dire consequences for how you process your art."

Conclusion? "We try to advise people that if they're thinking about moving to PS3 eventually, that they need to talk to us at the start so we can get things sorted out. I think that's going to be a very big challenge for everybody for awhile, because this idea of many, many cores with smaller local memories will present a lot of challenges in many different directions."

[One other note, while I'm on work stuff - Gamasutra writer Alistair Wallis is doing an article for Game Career Guide about testing and Q/A. If there are any testers out there who could talk to him about what they do, on the record - he can check with your PR folks after you contact him - then ping him at his Gamasutra address. Thanks!]