A few questions about this game's engine?

[JasonRoy]

First question is, why are you using Havok physics engine? Don't get me wrong, its a great tool. It was used in source engine to great effect, and the physics puzzle sequences in Half Life 2 that the game is famous for would not have been possible without Havok. However, for a game like Kenshi, the only real use I see for Havok is ragdolls and the navmeshes. The ragdolls in Kenshi are often hilariously buggy and stupid looking. I sometimes see a person fall unconscious from starvation, and then their body flies away like it was hit by a freight train. Sometimes it works great, but other times it glitches out and looks stupid. You could probably make animations for people falling over after combat death or otherwise, and it would look much better, though it could get a bit repetitive unless you make a ton of variants, but wouldn't the performance increase be worth it? It also appears that movement collisions are entirely done with characters moving on networks of invisible faces that can be cut and added to by placed objects and buildings (navmeshes), which Havok does provide. However, Havok's system has a ton of bells and whistles that I don't think Kenshi needs, as it is designed more for games with full 3d movement, so maybe a custom solution would work better? It just seems overkill to me, but if I'm wrong please educate me. I want to learn more about this stuff.

[Shidan]

Honestly, I think the main reason that they used Havok was to get away from a custom pathing engine. Originally they used a custom one, and there were so many problems it was a nightmare to constantly fix it up. They spent nearly an entire year of development time with little to no updates just swapping out the pathing engine, in order to get what we have now.

I don't know all the details, but I do know that Chris has mentioned multiple times how much he hated trying to use a custom one, and that he never would again. Hence, 3rd party engines like Havok.