Draft:Karma (software)

In 1994, Jussi Westergren, Karsten Howes, and Frédéric Francis established Lateral Logic Inc., the enterprise that would ultimately evolve into CM Labs Simulations. During its early years, the team concentrated on building visual simulators for ground vehicles, as well as engineering specialized software tools for physics-based environments. This initial research culminated in the 1998 launch of their Lateral Collision Engine (LCE).

By April 1999, MathEngine PLC purchased Lateral Logic, subsequently rebranding the studio as Critical Mass Systems. While operating under MathEngine, the Critical Mass crew played a significant role in engineering the parent company's foundational Dynamics and Collision Toolkits.

The corporate structure shifted again in 2001 when MathEngine spun off the Critical Mass Systems division. Retaining their Montreal headquarters and taking a segment of MathEngine's proprietary codebase with them, the newly independent company was officially named CM Labs Simulations. The inherited physics technology was given the name Vortex, a simulation engine that the team has actively updated and expanded upon ever since its initial release.^[5]

MathEngine PLC was founded in Oxford, England in 1997, and the company developed a physics engine in 1998-1999 to provide collision detection and physics calculations for interactive media. The physics engine (also created in part from CM Labs Simulations), originally just called MathEngine SDK, then MathEngine Dynamics; The first tech demo 'Actor', was released in 2000 to demonstrate the MathEngine Dynamics engine to the public. During the dot-com bubble burst of 2000 which put financial strain on the company, the physics engine that MathEngine had developed years prior was ultimately renamed to Karma.

In 2001, Epic Games licensed the Karma Physics software to handle the physics calculations within Unreal Engine 2. This agreement meant that third-party developers licensing the Unreal Engine received Karma's physics toolset by default.^[6]

In May 2002, Criterion Games announced that they would acquire the rights of Karma from MathEngine PLC. Criterion Games eventually integrated the Karma physics engine from MathEngine into RenderWare for real-time physics interactions, collisions and ragdoll physics in their games.^[7][8]

In July 2002, Criterion Software, the developers of the RenderWare engine, acquired MathEngine. Following the acquisition, the Karma branding was phased out. Criterion integrated the underlying physics algorithms into their own middleware suite, rebranding the technology as RenderWare Physics.^[9][10][11]

Karma provided physics calculations for the sixth-generation video game consoles and PC hardware. The engine's primary features included vehicle dynamics, constraint solvers (such as hinge and ball-and-socket joints), and ragdoll physics. Instead of relying on pre-animated sequences, Karma allowed character models to collapse dynamically based on skeletal joint limits and environmental impacts. MathEngine also provided developers with the Karma Authoring Tool (KAT), a utility program that allowed artists to assign physical properties like mass and friction directly to 3D assets without modifying the game's source code.

The most significant use of Karma was within the Unreal Engine 2 and 2.5 ecosystems. Beyond the Unreal Engine 2 ecosystem, the engine was also utilized in independent licenses, most notably in Shiny Entertainment's Enter the Matrix (2003), which used Karma to handle the game's complex character interactions and environmental destruction.

Russell L. Smith, one of the former developers and key programmers at MathEngine (who left in 1999), would later be the lead programmer of the Open Dynamics Engine (ODE), the first publicly available open-source real-time physics engine which was released in May 2001, which marked a democratizing and groundbreaking breakthrough in the physics middleware market.

By the mid-2000s, the physics middleware market became increasingly competitive. While Karma paved the way for physics in the Unreal Engine, Epic Games eventually transitioned to Ageia NovodeX (now known as NVIDIA PhysX) for the launch of Unreal Engine 3 in 2004. Similarly, Criterion's RenderWare Physics was eventually sidelined after Electronic Arts acquired Criterion in 2004, leading many developers to migrate to Havok.

In August 2004, CM Labs (then known as Critical Mass Labs) reached an agreement with Criterion Software to acquire the intellectual property, commercial rights, and customer list for the Karma physics engine. Electronic Arts (EA) had acquired Criterion Software just a few weeks prior to this deal. EA was primarily interested in Criterion's Burnout franchise and the RenderWare engine for internal use, rather than maintaining a third-party middleware sales division. CM Labs saw an opportunity to bolster its own Vortex simulation platform. Having acquired the Karma physics engine, they took over the support and development for a massive roster of existing professional and industrial clients who were primarily using the engine for non-gaming purposes.

Following the acquisition, the "Karma" engine was largely retired from the game world. CM Labs integrated the core technologies and algorithms from Karma into their Vortex Studio software.

While the gaming world moved on to other real-time physics engines like PhysX and Havok 3.0, the "DNA" of the Karma engine survived and evolved within Vortex. Today, Vortex is a leading platform used for high-fidelity simulation of heavy machinery, subsea robotics, and military vehicle training in contrast to the physics simulations seen in early 2000s video games.

• Unreal Tournament 2003: Used for ragdolls, vehicles, and projectile physics.
• Postal 2: Utilized the engine for its characteristic ragdoll physics and prop interactions.
• Cold Winter: Utilized for prop interaction, ragdoll physics, and destructible environments.
• Black (2006)
• Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30: Used Karma for environmental physics and soldier reactions.
• The Witcher (2007): Though built on an older version of the Aurora Engine, it utilized Karma for specific physics-based interactions.
• America's Army: Integrated Karma for realistic character movement and ballistics.^[12]

• Havok (software)
• Vortex (software)
• Open Dynamics Engine
• PhysX
• Unreal Engine 2
• RenderWare
• Middleware
• Physics engine

• Karma
• Legacy:Karma Authoring Tool