Trinigy

» see trinigy.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Over the turn of 2002 into 2003 a German company called Vulpine went under, and its 3D engine was bought out of the insolvency estate. The buyers formed Trinigy GmbH in Eningen unter Achalm, a small town in the Reutlingen district of Baden-Württemberg, and spent the next eight years licensing that engine to other people as the Vision Engine. A US office opened in Austin in 2007 and there was a Seoul presence as well. German Wikipedia records 2008 as the company's highest-revenue year, on the back of version 7.

The product was a cross-platform renderer and toolset sold to studios: Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, later the Vita and the phones. Shacknews named ArcaniA: Gothic 4 and Stronghold 3 as games running on it, with The Settlers 7 in the same sentence, and Game Developer named Ubisoft and Take-Two among the publishers who had licensed it. Trinigy also shipped a plugin so that its renderer could talk to Havok's physics, and that plugin is why the rest of this happened.

This is a business whose customers were other businesses, so there is no consumer story here and no Turkish angle to claim. Middleware reaches a player as a splash screen before the menu, if it reaches them at all. The part I recognize from my own working life is the position rather than the technology: a small team in a small town, selling one piece of technology to the people who could just as easily buy the whole company instead.

~ the record ~

~ eighth of august ~

Havok was wholly owned by Intel at the time, and it put out the acquisition announcement on 8 August 2011, saying the deal would close about two weeks later. No price was ever disclosed. David Coghlan, Havok's managing director, framed it as extending the reach of both companies' technologies "across new geographies and market segments", and the operative sentence was that the teams would be integrated and the Trinigy Vision Engine would be re-branded as the Havok Vision Engine.

So Trinigy's end is a month, not a day. English Wikipedia lists it as defunct in August 2011 with the fate "merged into Havok", the German article gives Auflösung 2011 with the reason "Übernahme durch Havok", and nobody recorded which day the paperwork completed. The announcement date is the only day-precision fact in the file.

~ discontinued, no date ~

Four years later Microsoft bought Havok, and somewhere in that stretch the engine stopped. The rundown of Havok products on Wikipedia carries the Vision Engine with "(discontinued)" after the name and no date beside it, cited to the old Trinigy press release and nothing else. That is the second ending, and the one nobody wrote down. Mirror sites put the final build in early 2014 without citing a source.

trinigy.net still resolves. Over http it redirects to havok.com, about 600 kilobytes of live WordPress belonging to a company Microsoft owns, and over https the certificate no longer works. The brand it points at no longer sells the thing the domain was registered for. An engine that survived one bankruptcy because it was worth buying got retired in the end by an owner holding something better.

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