Announcing the Havok4 Early Adopter Program
Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 3:10 PM by: Sidewinder LindenSeveral months ago public beta testing of “the project you thought would never ever get finished” was announced - the project to update Second Life with the Havok4 physics engine. For more information about the Havok4 project, please see the Havok4 Beta Wiki.
Announcing the Havok4 Early Adopter Program
The Havok4 Early Adopter Program allows private island owners to “opt-in”, and choose to switch to Havok4-based Second Life regions.
Forty regions in Second Life are already using the beta Havok4-based Second Life simulator. So far, the results have been promising, and we have been resolving issues and updating the simulator programming on a regular basis.
One of our early testers said:
“… and THAT is why I love Havok 4… We get griefed, the sim doesn’t even *blink*, and it takes ten seconds to clean up.. I’ve seen commercials that last longer.”
A Few Things To Know
If you opt in to the Early Adopter Program, we will switch any regions you choose, of those that you own, to run the beta Havok4-based version of the Second Life simulator. Please note that you will likely find things that don’t work as expected - the point of this program is to find the remaining oddities before we roll the new version of Second Life out to the rest of Second Life!
In particular, there are issues currently being worked on with:
* vehicle actions (some vehicles work well, while others do “odd things” or do not behave as expected)
* physics tuning to adjust the behavior of scripted objects
* performance optimization
* other bugs that present different behaviors on Havok4 than the current Havok1 server
By opting in to the program, you are committing to work with us as we work through the final clean-up of this new version of Second Life simulator code, and to keep the new version on your region as we work through resolving any issues that you find.
How You Can Opt-In
1) The Early Adopter Program is limited to the first 300 region requests that we receive, and will be fullfilled in the order received. Opt-in early if you want to participate!
2) You must be a private island owner to opt-in to the Havok4 Early Adopter program.
3) Log in on the http://secondlife.com/support/ page
4) Click the “Submit a Ticket” link
5) Please use the following settings for your new ticket:
* Ticket Type: “Land and Region Issues”
Region Request: “Region Change”
Region Change: “Havok4 Early Adopter Program”
How to Report Bugs
If you find a Havok4 simulator problem, please create an item in the public issue tracker at http://jira.secondlife.com/. You can tell if you are in a region running Havok4 by choosing Help > About Second Life in the viewer.
If the fourth text line reads “Havok4 Beta Server”, then you are in a region running Havok4. If the fourth text line reads “Second Life Server”, then you are in a region running our earlier Havok1 simulator.
To submit a Havok4 bug:
1) Log in to the https://jira.secondlife.com/ page with your Second Life avatar name and password.
2) Click “Create New Issue”
3) Set PROJECT to “2 Second Life Service - SVC” and ISSUE TYPE to “Bug”
4) On the next page, type step-by-step instructions for how to create the problem, and if specific products are involved include the product vendor name and specific product name and version.
5) VERY IMPORTANT: Please set COMPONENTS = “Physics” and AFFECTS VERSIONS = “Havok4 Beta”. If you do not choose these settings, the Havok4 team may not see your bug report for a while!
For a demo of the jira public issue tracker, see Torley’s great video “how to report a bug“. Again, please be sure to set COMPONENTS = “Physics” and AFFECTS VERSIONS = “Havok4 Beta”!
Thanks in advance for helping to test the next generation Second Life simulator. We really appreciate your help in making Second Life better.
As we resolve issues and get closer to a version for release to the Second Life Grid, we will be deploying updated versions to our Early Adopter regions.
Best regards,
Sidewinder Linden
Program Manager
January 18th, 2008 at 3:14 PM
FurNation has been testing Havok4 on a number sims for a few weeks now.
January 18th, 2008 at 3:21 PM
But can you opt back out if it totally messes you up? How do you opt back out?
January 18th, 2008 at 3:21 PM
Whee! I’m signing up right now!
January 18th, 2008 at 3:24 PM
Hell yes!
I’m all over this.
January 18th, 2008 at 3:28 PM
I haven’t really had much chance to voice my opinion on Havok 4. I must say, I’m impressed that, though LL has been pressured to adopt a new physics engine, rather than adoption Havok 2 or 3, they went above and beyond the call of duty and jumped all the way to 4, grabbing the most advanced engine they could. If you’re gonna do it, do it right, and I’m glad to see that philosophy being put to use here.
People may cry for more bug fixes, but I think this is going to deliver more than they realize. There are alot of hard-to-fix bugs in Havok 1, so rather than fixing them, LL is just replacing the physics engine. This will give us a whole new series of bugs, but it will fix the ones we want fixed, and give LL a more advanced engine, and a clean slate to work from, and should make future physics-related bug fixes alot easier.
Even more impressive, however, is how fast this has been. When I heard H4 was in beta, I saw the ball rolling and expected the new physics engine within this year, but I never imagined that sims on the main grid would be converting in large numbers in January. Wow.
In short, this move to Havok 4, I think, is VERY good all ’round, for features and for bug fixes, and ushers in a new era for vehicles, with new possibilities never before concieved, and is demonstrating an extremely fast pace of progress that is very impressive, to me at least. Nice job, Lindens, this was a GOOD move.
January 18th, 2008 at 3:30 PM
I am SOOO signed on for this
historic “Caledon” standard class 4
“Caledon SteamSkyCity” standard class 5
“Caledon Cymru” openspace class 5
I invite everyone on the grid to have a go at it!
This rocks, Sidewinder!!!
January 18th, 2008 at 3:36 PM
@2 Flurry: Yes if there are problems we can switch you back to Havok1. We do, however want you to be sure you want to participate for the long term, so that we do not have people up in “flipping” regions back and forth” on a regular basis. If there is a serious problem, and our projected fix timing creates a large issue for the region’s operation, I will absolutely be happy to switch a region owner back to Havok1 while we resolve it.
Best regards,
Sidewinder
January 18th, 2008 at 3:38 PM
@Desmond: Thanks for your interest! Please submit a request to Concierge, as outlined in the blog post. I will not be converting regions based on posts here, so that we can track the changes in a coordinated way. /Sidewinder
January 18th, 2008 at 3:43 PM
I have done, sir
*dances gleefully*
*ducks and hides, before Ordinal Malaprop logs into a Havok4′d Caledon…*
January 18th, 2008 at 3:48 PM
The City of Lost Angels has been working pretty closely with the H4 team for awhile now and the experience in general has been good, we’ve attempted to switch over to H4 live but identified a few issues and the H4 team very quickly switched us back over to H1 and had the issues identified and a new build run through QA, we hope to switch back to a more effective situation under H4 very soon.
Regardless the H4 experience has been, more or less, what I feel all new development in SL should be, a partnership between the Linden Developers and high end content developers to produce more effective technology for the platform, and should these kinds of hand in hand dev projects continue, Second Life is going to become a very interesting place indeed.
Thanks to Sidewinder and the H4 team for their work on this project.
January 18th, 2008 at 3:49 PM
Yeah .. more prims . More stability .. Rock on ! the sooner the better
January 18th, 2008 at 3:52 PM
I have 4 sims … if we opt one of the sim into the program, will users get that warning popup about entering a region running a different simulator version if they travel between borders or teleport in?
January 18th, 2008 at 3:56 PM
Just how does this solve the extreme lag conditions we are experiencing? Don’t you dare delete this question! Give me a specific and honest answer!
January 18th, 2008 at 4:00 PM
its awsome they upgrade to havok 4, to decrease the sim crashing, altho havok 4 is NOT the newest, havok 5 is there already.
i hope the next upgrade will be the anoying lock ups, and better performance client side, coz thats really a big headache for lots of people.
i really hope this will solve allot of lag tho, altho when at furnation, with havok 4, it kinda lagged badly…
i hope it’ll be better soon
January 18th, 2008 at 4:01 PM
Wooot I’m signing up!!!
January 18th, 2008 at 4:01 PM
Suggestion: Someone should put a list of simulators running Havok4 up on the wiki.
January 18th, 2008 at 4:04 PM
Is there any specific benefit for land owners singing up for this?
January 18th, 2008 at 4:06 PM
I think this is great. I can’t wait to see what happens with this.
January 18th, 2008 at 4:29 PM
Now I wish I’d opted for a whole sim instead of parts all over the place.. bugger.
I am curious about mainland use of havok 4 - example, if a (small) group of owners in a sim all agreed to have havok4 applied, would/could it be an option, or is it solely for private islands?
I can see flying from one sim into a havok4 enabled sim would be.. hehe.. but if the mainland sim was private/group, only letting in group members, would/could it be an option to be a part of the havok4 testing?
January 18th, 2008 at 4:40 PM
Will certainly sign a sim up for this. And I have just the one…
January 18th, 2008 at 4:44 PM
What can we do when the support page is clogged and it doesn’t load…
January 18th, 2008 at 4:55 PM
Ticket > 404 error after 10 mins of finishing
chat > Never openes up
concierge phone support > Down
I don’t call this a stable service.
January 18th, 2008 at 4:55 PM
The only drawback to havok 4 is, it breaks a LOT of things, but they can be mostlyfixed, something I bought recently only halfway works now, and I cant fix it, oh well, I’ll probably be bored with it by the time havok 4 is fully rolled out.
Some vehicles I made will be drastically effected to.
Another thing that’s been changed, numerical values that affect the speed of things are more sensitive than before. So if you have something rotating at the speed of 18, it’ll be more like 80, you you’d probably want to drop that number down a bit.
January 18th, 2008 at 4:56 PM
Having downloaded the Havok4 Beta, I can honestly say that I did not notice a great difference. Yes, physical ball-prims do roll more naturally. But I was still able to cause tremendous lag in the sim. At 200 meters up, on a sandbox platform, I created a few hundred small,physical ,prim balls (created 10..shift/copied…checked the fps…shift copied more…etc..). Within a few minutes, I could barely walk due to the lag. I flew (very slowly) to various parts of the sim and the lag remained awful. It quickly subsided after I deleted the prims.
Bottom line, lag is still going to occurr if land owners/renters remain oblivious to their land settings and/or do not routinely check on parcels they own.
Dont get me wrong, I am all for Havok4 and I do understand there are many benefits. My point is that the improvements are not immediately noticeable as some residents may think.
January 18th, 2008 at 5:02 PM
Theres not actually a noticeable difference in Havok 4 to the standard user. Its not really something thats going to be the cure all for lag and time dilation and that kind of thing.
Lag is based in assets and agents, time dilation is based in server side hit detection, both of these things are planned, somewhere down the line, for upgrades, as far as I know.
What is good about Havok 4, is your region cannot be crashed by any normal known means. Period. We ran a large participation public pile on on the Havok 4 beta grid with the CoLA community and had around 40+ people running around shooting each other while we had every griefer tool our community has possession of (which was rather surprisingly large) and the sim would not go down.
Thats 40+ people firing guns using physical bullets, plus particle nukes, physics nukes, self replicating physical objects, mega prim self replicators and linked physical objects being drag copied….and the sim would not go down for any of it.
So yeah the benefits aren’t immediately visible, unless of course you’re interested in nearly infallible server stability…which H4 provides pretty well.
Yes the “lag” issues are still a problem, but the “lag” issues in Second Life are not physics related….and are another mountain to tackle down the line.
January 18th, 2008 at 5:02 PM
I saw the blog, and wasted an hour trying to submit / open chat / make phone call for this.
Nothing works… I can’t believe I am paying thousands of dollers into this thing every month… ;(
January 18th, 2008 at 5:03 PM
Is there some way to find a list of the Havok4 sims in the live grid?
January 18th, 2008 at 5:11 PM
>> the project you thought would never ever get finished
I thought that was Mono?!
You meant to say “one of the projects”
January 18th, 2008 at 5:40 PM
It would be helpful if we could see in our Browser when we were in a Havok4 Sim…it would help make bug reporting more focussed too.
is there a way we can tell?
January 18th, 2008 at 5:44 PM
I have heard great things of the new Havok4. I hope to see it working and impressing customers all over my island. Thanks.
-Organized Republic
January 18th, 2008 at 5:47 PM
One Time Lord signed up. Gallifrey will live again!
January 18th, 2008 at 6:00 PM
The way I see it, Havok 4 can’t be any more borked than the current Havok 1 since the rolling restart.
Can you say “constant crashes”?
January 18th, 2008 at 6:05 PM
This is wonderful news!
January 18th, 2008 at 6:19 PM
If you are looking for any full-sim Mainland owners, let me know if I can sign up. Tipperary is at the nexus of several linden ocean sims. Might help in testing boats and air vehicles.
January 18th, 2008 at 6:32 PM
Congratulations, Linden Lab, for releasing this for us to test on the Het Grid
I’m sadly no Estate Owner (just a lowly Estate Manager of a dozen islands or so), but will press the Owners to move swiftly over and get all the advantages of Havok 4
January 18th, 2008 at 6:47 PM
I so on this I can`t wait!
January 18th, 2008 at 7:02 PM
This is awesome news!
Let’s hope the next “project you thought would never ever get finished” to actually get finished is Mono. XD
Keep up the great work!
January 18th, 2008 at 7:33 PM
Well.. alls I can say is.. about time.
January 18th, 2008 at 7:37 PM
I REALLY wanna see a lit of some HavoK4 enabled Sims so I can go and test my most expensive bikes on ‘em ASAP, since I know there’s gonna be a noticeable difference in handling and how fast they gain speed…at least there is on the BETA grid
I bet bullet speed is affected too, but that’s GREAT about the huge increase in Sim stability!
A lot of scripted objects wil be retired, but that’s bound to keep happening as the platform “ages” over time
January 18th, 2008 at 7:37 PM
how long until it reach the main game?
January 18th, 2008 at 7:41 PM
I think what the poster above means is, do we have any ETA?
January 18th, 2008 at 7:43 PM
I found one simulator already on the main land with havok 4 - Pawleys Island. After I came back to my own sim, I got a region message telling me the server software was different. It turns out this is standard. However, I couldn’t follow the link to the knowledge base explaining this in more detail. I filed a bug about it (VWR-4277) for wind light. I’m not sure if it affects other clients.
January 18th, 2008 at 7:43 PM
Sidewinder, is it posible to switch adjoining regions in clusters or do all regions in a cluster need to switch also ?
January 18th, 2008 at 7:49 PM
So now the het-grid starts to pay off… Grats to all. However, as someone pointed out, there should be a list of early-adopter sims. This should actually be a *reward* for a being an early adopter. That way, people will tend to visit your sim more often and Linden Lab will get feedback faster about any potential problems due to the increased use of the sim. In other words, every time someone visits the wiki (or even every time they log in!), a URL is presented to see the first xxx sims which have opted to adopt a new technology before anyone else. If it’s just a listing on the wiki, you’ll see dozens of sims opting in. If it is a url that shows on login, you’ll see hundreds, even a thousand or more opting-in ASAP. They can’t BUY that kind of advertising.
January 18th, 2008 at 7:54 PM
@12 Nadir: Ahh “the popup”.. I have been working with the other teams, and we hope to have a fairly short term solution that will remove that pop-up and replace it with something less jarring. For now, yes you will get the pop-up about entering a region that is running a different simulator version. in the hopefully fairly near term that should go away. I do not want to commit for another team’s deliverables, so I cannot say for sure the delivery date, but can assure you that this change is in motion for near term action. /Sidewinder
January 18th, 2008 at 8:05 PM
So what exactly does “performance optimisation” mean? Does that mean that with Windlight, half of us will be so lagged out we won’t be able to move, rendering physics somewhat pointless? As indeed will be staying in SL?
January 18th, 2008 at 8:07 PM
@13 What On Earth?: Lag is not a single-sourced problem. Some lag is simulator based, and only part of that is physics. Whether physics is a lag source depends on the build and what people are doing on the region. Performance in the world of Second Life is based on many, many factors, and people are not being evasive by avoiding saying that “this one thing is the source”. They are being truthful that it is a complex question and set of answers, and that only some of the sources of lag have to do with the Second Life Grid.
Many lag sources are viewer-based, and are *very* sensitive to the graphics card in your machine. There are literally differences of 10-20x in performance of various graphics cards, and this interacts with the environment that your avatar is in in some non-obvious ways. In addition, if you use a wireless network connection, there are likely regular performance drops due to wireless interference from other devices in your area, such as wireless home phones (some of which use the same frequency range as 802.11 wireless networks).
A common source of “lag” is actually created by changing your viewer settings. Because of the way that modern video systems work, much of the rendering (drawing) is not done on your computer’s CPU. That work is done on the GPU (graphics processing unit) on your video card. The problem is that if you select graphics settings that your video driver software or graphics card cannot handle well, your computer may run much more slowly due to the card being overloaded, or even run those tasks on the host CPU of your computer, which is *far* slower at these tasks than your graphics card. Experimentation with your graphics settings, using your graphics card, in the scenes that you frequent, might lead to significantly improved performance.
With that all said, there are projects throughout the Linden Lab development community that are targeted to increasing performance, reducing lag and improving reliability.
Our early Havok4 testers have noticed that even under high load, Havok4-based regions tend to feel “smoother” and have more consistent avatar movement than the older Havok1-based simulators. I have been focused on the Havok4 project and the server/simulator side of things, but perhaps I should start doing office hours separately from that and perhaps discussing these issues would be a good set of topics.
Best regards,
Sidewinder
January 18th, 2008 at 8:16 PM
@14 BraadWorst: I’ll reply to each part of your comments in parts…
“altho havok 4 is NOT the newest, havok 5 is there already.”
Yes, Havok5 is now released. When we started implementing Havok4, however it was far from released. At the moment Havok4 provides a wealth of possibilities, and frankly the real challenge for us was getting past Havok1. The architectural changes from Havok1 to Havok2 were much larger than those between Havok4 and Havok5, and we expect that port to be easier. At the same time, implementing a brand new major version of Havok5 may bring as many new “curiosities” (bugs) as it solves, so I believe that it is not inappropriate to stick with Havok4 for a while before deciding to take the next step.
Annoying lock-ups and client side issues: These are being worked on, although that work is being done by several teams other than the Havok4 team. Already the viewer crash rates have been somewhat lowered, and are being pushed farther down by continuing work.
At the same time, please realize that some of these issues are caused by Second Life code issues, but many of them are caused by things that have nothing to do with Second Life programming! On many occasions our development teams have had to work around problems with specific video drivers and video cards, and we have opened a stronger dialog with the hardware vendors in order to try to both avoid these issues in the first place, and to try to resolve the problems faster when we find issues with graphics cards and their support software.
Solving lag: As mentioned in the previous post, lag comes from many place, not always the server. Havok4 is smoother under high load than Havok1, as mentioned before.
Please remember is that we are still in an expanded beta testing phase, and right at this moment - literally over the next week or two, we are planning to do some more detailed performance analysis and optimizations. Up to this point we had not been focused on performance optimization, because we were working principally on core functional issues.
The Havok4 simulator that you see today will have significant additional work done on it before it is released for use across the rest of the Second Life Grid.
/Sidewinder
January 18th, 2008 at 8:18 PM
@16 Gaius: I’ve thought about posting the Havok4 region list, but frankly am not sure that that is a good idea. People running Havok4 regions may not want to be over-run with visitors showing up to “play with Havok4″.
The entire beta grid, except for some reference Havok1 regions, is deployed with the same Havok4 code that we are running on the main Second Life system, so I’m not sure I see the need to publish the “who’s who” list. Am I missing the point on this one?
Thanks in advance,
Sidewinder
January 18th, 2008 at 8:23 PM
@17 Marianne:
“Is there any specific benefit for land owners singing up for this?”
Hi Marianne,
There are several benefits of signing up for the Early Adopter Program:
1) You get to preview the newest Second Life version, and have input as to what are the important things that need to be fixed or modified before it gets rolled out to the rest of Second Life.
2) Your region will likely have a lower crash rate, and may be easier to clean up from griefer attacks. While I cannot promise this to be the case universally, and certainly folks will find new crash vectors, our early users have found these two things to be true.
3) If you are a builder, and in particular a builder who does scripting, you will have direct experience with your own region to see how you might want to adjust your scripts to take full advantage of our new Havok4 regions when they do spread across the rest of Second Life.
At the same time, this is a beta build, so it will have some issues, and the benefit to us and to Second Life as a whole is that you will focus on finding the open problems, reporting them and working with us so that we know what needs to be fixed before we fold this work into the main Second Life simulator and deploy it in a much larger fashion.
I hope this helps to put the program in better perspective, and if you have questions, please feel free to get in touch directly.
/Sidewinder
January 18th, 2008 at 8:27 PM
@19 Damen:
“The Havok4 on the mainland question”: Funny you should bring this up, as I just raised this in our development team meeting this afternoon. We had been avoiding deploying Havok4 on the mainland, because we previously had some issues with vehicles doing strange things when transitioning between Havok4 and Havok1 regions. I believe that these issues are now resolved, or at least mostly resolved.
So… this is still an open question, but one that we are talking about. For at least the early phase of this process we will not be converting mainland regions, but are discussing how that might work. If you have ideas on how we might handle the question of mainland region testing, please share them, as it’s still an open question. (One option is to hold off on mainland conversion until we are ready to “deploy the whole world” with this new simulator, and we’re not sure if that is a wise choice or not…)
/Sidewinder
January 18th, 2008 at 8:36 PM
@23 At0m0:
“The only drawback to havok 4 is, it breaks a LOT of things,”
Hmm. At0m0, about a month ago, I would have agreed with this statement, and that is why I did not start talking about an Early Adopter Program until recently. We put intense focus on removing content corruption problems. Are there still some vehicles that do odd things? Absolutely. Is that number *far* lower than even last week? Absolutely.
At this point I do not agree with this statement. Some things behave strangely, but as far as I know we do not *break* any content in a way that keeps it from working on another version of the Second Life simulator. In addition, the number of things that behave strangely is being driven down, fairly dramatically, each week.
I have personally engaged with a number of the top vehicle builders in a variety of categories (air, water, ground, and even skydivers) to be sure that we are working with the folks who can tell us whether the new Havok4-based simulator works correctly for their products or not.
Now that we are focusing on vehicles (which is new as of last week!) the feedback has already been overwhelmingly positive.
There will be some old items that just will not work with a completely new version of the system, and that is true of every major software update since the beginning of time, and something that may never change.
At the same time, we are working to carefully maintain compatibility as much as possible, and has led to comments like this one - from testing on the build that we just deployed: “The difference is now so close that variances in measurement timing can explain it. It is possible this number is exactly equivalent to the main grid.”
If you are a builder and want to be sure that your content works with the beta Havok4 simulator (and the eventual released versions), then please test your work on the Beta Preview, attend our office hours and get involved. As our current dedicated crew of early testers and users will attest - we do listen and do fix things if we know they’re broken.
Regards,
Sidewinder
January 18th, 2008 at 8:39 PM
Will you all ever fix support for older surls?
January 18th, 2008 at 8:40 PM
@24 Lao:
You are correct in saying that lag will still exist. We are still doing performance tuning that I believe will have some substantial benefits and drive lag down, in those cases where physics lag was the source.
In addition, please note that there are many cases in which the Havok1 simulator would have crashed and been down, that the Havok4 simulator keeps on going - albeit it might be heavily loaded and run somewhat slowly, but the older version would have been down and never recovered.
At the same time, on it’s own, this work will not “fix all problems from all sources”! We aim to update the physics engine, reduce region crashes, maintain compatibility for content as much as possible, and enable a set of future “way cool stuff” that a new physics engine makes possible
/Sidewinder
January 18th, 2008 at 8:40 PM
I’ve signed my sim up! (Curious Kitties) can’t wait to see this! =^.^=
January 18th, 2008 at 8:41 PM
I’m afraid I’ve now four different projects that regard llSetStatus(12,FALSE); as utterly vital. HAVOC 4 isn’t working, with that.
Kitto’s Train is working okay in Content To Hover, but my Swivel Chair is still toppling over, until the wrong way to turn it is called
I understand Mono is what the Beta Grid is being cleared for. I’ve another Rail Rocket, that I’d like to try on a length of Track, or Guide, but without being able to freeze the Axese, I may just have to be using llRotLookAt().
I had an interesting though, for future Het Grid Dev, is Sims that use an alternative to physics, for moving Avies, just llSetPos(), so that future Sim Owners can vary their Physics Investment. Granted, it won’t be very popular, but it would open the path to not falling through the ground, every time you walk across the borders.
January 18th, 2008 at 8:47 PM
@29 Dark:
You can tell whether you are in a Havok4 region from the Second Life viewer.
To tell which type of region you are in, select “About Second Life..” from the “Help” menu. Look at the fourth line of test in the “About Second Life” information panel:
If you see “Second Life Server 1.18.6.77554″, then the region you are standing on is the standard Havok1-based Second Life simulator that is running most of the Second Life Grid regions.
If you see “Havok4 Beta Server 1.18.6.77587″, then you are standing on an Early Adopter Program Havok4 simulator.
PLEASE NOTE: These version numbers will change over time, as we update the programming of both the original and Havok4 simulators. However, the Havok4 simulator will continue to be tagged “Havok4 Beta Server” until it gets folded in to become our standard simulator.
/Sidewinder
January 18th, 2008 at 8:50 PM
@39 Xio:
At the moment there is one category of scripted vehicles that we know are “not right yet”. Vehicles that are sophisticated and are “part vehicle and part attachment” are known to be generally not working right yet. We will be working on these over the next few weeks, and I suspect that we will have strong progress within that timeframe.
If you would like to check the current Havok4 build, feel free to download the Beta viewer - all of the Beta Preview is Havok4, except for the few regions that are running Havok1 for comparison (and they have a pretty obvious “Havok1″ ground texture on them and Havok1 in the region name).
/Sidewinder
January 18th, 2008 at 8:53 PM
@43 Ryu: Adjacent regions… This is another “if you’d asked me a week ago you would have gotten a different answer” question
We have resolved all the open bugs that we know about with region crossing between Havok4 and Havok1 regions, so at this point we think it is fine to bring up a Havok4 region next to a Havok1 region. You may find a new bug related to that region crossing, and we’ll take care of it asap if you do find one, but at this point that configuration is not a problem.
/Sidewinder
January 18th, 2008 at 8:58 PM
@44 Saijani: I’ll talk to folks on Monday about the idea of publishing the Early Adopter list. I had presumed that out of respect for privacy we wouldn’t, but perhaps I’m all wet on that one. I’m hearing the “we should do this” comments. To me, this depends on whether the estate owners feel as you suggest, and that they would prefer to be put in public view as early adopters. Thanks for your thoughts on this. /Sidewinder
January 18th, 2008 at 9:01 PM
@46 Montana: What performance optimization means is working to make sure that Havok4 regions perform as well or better than Havok1 regions in as many scenarios as possible. Having a faster simulator does not make viewers slower, so I’m not sure what this has to with Windlight or why improving simulator performance would hurt other performance… /Sidewinder
January 18th, 2008 at 9:05 PM
@56 Aaron; I’ll answer your post in parts.
For starters, the beta preview is not “being cleared for mono”. I have no idea what you mean by this, nor where the information came from.
We have, in fact, added some automation that makes it very easy to copy a snapshot of a Second Life Grid region to the Beta Preview complete and intact for testing. If you would like your region copied onto the Beta Preview for testing IM me in world and I’ll be happy to get that done for you.
If you are finding that llSetStatus is not behaving, PLEASE file a jira on this, and mark it as critical. Please include a code sample to demonstrate the problem that you are reporting so that we can easily replicate the bad behavior. Any non-working LSL functions that worked in Havok1 are very high priority for us and will get attention quickly. In addition please consider attending office hours so that you can get any other questions or concerns addressed quickly.
Aaron - please make sure to set your jira so that Component = PHYSICS and Affects Versions = HAVOK4 BETA, so that our dev team sees it right away. Issues not tagged in this way may not make it onto our radar for a while…
Thanks in advance,
Sidewinder
January 18th, 2008 at 9:10 PM
@25 Suzanna: Thanks! /Sidewinder
January 18th, 2008 at 9:34 PM
Sidewinder i’d like to say thanks for taking the time to answer peoples questions this is what we need,looking forward to havok 4 going grid wide and good luck with your progress.
January 18th, 2008 at 9:39 PM
Any time frame when we know if when will get the update on our sims after our application? Thanks
January 18th, 2008 at 9:43 PM
I was just in the beta grid recently and had some issues.
What would be nice to see is more realistic vehicle physics, if anyone here has played half-life 2, which uses the havok 4 engine, you know that it’s very possible.
January 18th, 2008 at 9:47 PM
@65 elvisorbit: Region switchovers will be handled by the Concierge team in the order that they are received. I am not sure about the conversion timetable, but you could check with Concierge to see how they are doing in terms of turnaround. This is a new process for us, so I would expect some “figuring out time” on the first batches. See my post #57 for how you can tell whether the region you are standing on is Havok1 or Havok4. /Sidewinder
January 18th, 2008 at 9:49 PM
SW, obviously, if someone doesn’t want to be listed as an”early adopter,” you should respect their wishes, but honestly, people pay a lot of money to get listed in Search. I can’t imagine many who wouldn’t want their sim’s name listed (complete with slurl, natch) in a list accessible from the main page of the wiki or even the login splash screen! A “go to this featured sim” provision in the login screen would be even MORE incentive to become an early adopter, though of course, early adopters could request NOT to be part of that listing.
January 18th, 2008 at 9:50 PM
The Avilion estates will be participating as well in the testing. Going to have two sims (Avilion Isle and Avilion Hinterlands) for testing.
Hope everything works out so we can place get all of the sims on the Havoc 4!
This is a great moment, and I’m thankful for the hard work and testing you all have been doing for this. Can’t wait to see the differences and improvements!
January 18th, 2008 at 9:58 PM
@66 At0m0: As mentioned above, we just started work on vehicle issues in the last week, so there will be more improvements. Havok4 will help us along that path.
At the same time, there is a significant architectural difference between shooter games such as Half Life 2 and Second Life. In the “prototypical shooter” game, most of the content is static, and developed by the game manufacturer. That content is downloaded to your computer at installation time and can be pre-optimized for fast rendering.
Second Life, on the other hand, is completely dynamically created by the residents of Second Life. At *any* point, some part of the scene may be modified by yourself or another user, and so many of the shooter game standard optimizations cannot be used to speed up and smooth out animation and rendering.
We have looked at ways to improve responsiveness without removing the huge value that is created in having a world dynamically built by you. There are some possibilities that we have discussed. Suffice it to say that implementing Havok4 and replacing our old Havok1-based physics simulation is just one step along a path to a more advanced Second Life.
/Sidewinder (who would like to some day have physics and “feel” that rival a commercial shooter game in Second Life, but doesn’t want to nuke the best parts of Second Life to get there
January 18th, 2008 at 10:21 PM
it doesn’t have to be either/or of course. Properly designed, I’m sure that sims + more advanced SL physics and comms protocols could rival current MMORPG games for responsiveness. Things would have to be tweaked on the content-creation side to get there of course, but it should be doable if the sim owner limits what is allowed into the sim.
January 18th, 2008 at 10:39 PM
brilliant! keep up the good work!
LL listening to its users? whatever next? lol
oh and the comment about Windlight. if it’s slow on your pc then you pc simply isn’t up to running it.
and another note, clientside crashes for me atleast are now very, very rare. i only crash when i’m doing other things with my pc and it gets too stressed out.
January 18th, 2008 at 10:49 PM
Sidewinder……you are a Saint spending so much time answering questions. LL is very lucky to have you.
That said….anyone can feel free to IM me in world and you can come check out my sim.
January 18th, 2008 at 10:51 PM
I’ve been setting a lot of my objects to be phantom in the hopes that this helps the underlying physics engine. Does this indeed have an effect? Also, does locking content help the client cache objects easier?
January 18th, 2008 at 11:01 PM
Havok 4 early-adopter program
Havok 4 in Second Life adds exactly no new features (by design), unless you count not getting confused, stuck, overloaded or crashing quite so easily as features. At least that’s the plan.
January 18th, 2008 at 11:17 PM
“Several months ago public beta testing of “the project you thought would never ever get finished” was announced”
So in other words, it isn’t actually finished? Perhaps you should follow the Linden convention and mark it “[FINISHED]“.
January 18th, 2008 at 11:25 PM
Congratulations Sidewinder on getting this far on a huge project (congrats for also holding the title of Linden who works hardest in blog cleaning crud and answering questions).
I’ve asked my estate manager to sign one of my regions up, if it gets in in time it will be interesting to see, three adjoining regions will be Havok 1.
I hope you don’t publish the list of regions converted, I don’t really want my scripting work swamped with people coming in and trying to crash my sim.
If you do plan on publishing this list please make it opt in to preserve privacy, safety and anonymity.
January 18th, 2008 at 11:49 PM
Thank you sidewinder for the blog entries! It’s great to see the responces! I love it!
:D
Can’t wait to have havok 4 on my sim
January 18th, 2008 at 11:54 PM
Question: can single open space regions be switched or only the complete 4pack?
January 19th, 2008 at 12:18 AM
Thank you Sidewinder for taking the time to answer all the questions. Looks like we will be switching our sim to Havok 4 as well.
January 19th, 2008 at 12:21 AM
Havok 4 Out — Yes, At Last!
January 19th, 2008 at 12:42 AM
Question: will the implementation of Havok4 also lead to being able to have more than 15k prims on a sim, ultimately?
January 19th, 2008 at 1:05 AM
@Sidewinder: i’ve looked at recent post to figure out if a different sim version (that would cover this case) will bring up the “annoying” popup screen even on teleport. I’m running a single simulator so a region crossing isn’t a problem of me, but TP’ing for my customers would be (alot) annoying. It the reply is: “Yes, they will receive the popup message”, please make it removed faster than light.
Second benefit: receive a beta preview, develop (building, scripting) looking at the future etc, but how to incentivate us with a concrete way? I’ve alread signed up to partecipate to the program, but i know that this would affect my business (it is beta, you never know…) but i’m damn curious and i love to experiement.. so why not giving us some more prims (30k? 25k?) on these sims? This would be a honest reward, imo: you do your tests, we help you to make it works, and we receive a honest payback for our efforts and “risks”. Thank you.
January 19th, 2008 at 1:15 AM
Any hope we’ll get scripted avatar rotation control under Havok4?
January 19th, 2008 at 1:28 AM
Let me just say sidewinder that your time spent responding to us is worth it’s weight in gold or even gold plated latvium if you are a geek. If I ever see you online you are so getting a hug and a freshly baked cookie. Keep up the good work.
And to keep on topic I also and wondering if open space sims are individually switched to havok 4 or if it is done in a 4 pack.
January 19th, 2008 at 2:06 AM
I remember there being issues with huge prims in a previous Havok4 announcement. Are these issues fixed or…? What happenned to huge prims in Havok4?
January 19th, 2008 at 2:29 AM
I’ve opted
if I’m not too late, that is. The scripters in 3DG have been raving about the possibilities so I can’t deny them this ^_^
Thanks for the option to opt!
January 19th, 2008 at 3:18 AM
I wonder about the huge prims too.. I read in an older post huge prims up till a certain height would be allowed.. will they continued to be so in havoc4?
Ive heard so many good things about havoc! if only half of it is true it will be great!
January 19th, 2008 at 4:20 AM
@mimi each blog Sidewinder gets asked about megaprims, the answer is that at this point in time prims under 256×256 (one region) will be allowed to be rezzed, while those above 256×256 will no longer be able to be rezzed (but will remain in world). I recall his saying there will be no tools to create prims larger than 10×10x10
January 19th, 2008 at 4:39 AM
@88:
Havoc 4 downsizes megaprims down to 256m in side length currently, and there are plans to correctly calculate the event a prim overlaps a parcel border (currently the sims only check for object center). Once that is in place, megaprims won’t be needed anymore as people will be able to freely scale their prims, as long as they stick to their parcel.
January 19th, 2008 at 5:32 AM
@79 danielregenbogen: Any single region (any single named tile on the map, if you’d like to think about it that way), whether part of a 4-pack or not, can be converted to Havok4. /Sidewinder
January 19th, 2008 at 5:35 AM
@82 Dix: We don’t have any plans for supporting more than 15k prims on a region with this project. /Sidewinder
January 19th, 2008 at 5:43 AM
@83 Vittorio: An alternative to the region crossing pop-up is being worked on by the team responsible for that area. I won’t forget to keep nudging that as quickly as possible. We will not be adding other “incentives” to this program, as we want to be testing the same simulator configuration and environment that people will encounter in widespread use, and testing some “specially altered version” does not help us towards that goal. Nice try though ;). /Sidewinder
January 19th, 2008 at 5:55 AM
Sidewinder, this has been great. I have no comments to make on havoc 4 except keep up the good work.
@ALL OTHER BLOGGING LINDENS - This is THE best example of blog communications I have seen since I have been in SL. Please take note of it. It has information, it has Q&A, it is in a word COMMUNICATION!!
Rock On Sidewinder, you definately raised the bar on this one.
DRD
January 19th, 2008 at 6:07 AM
me, i cannot wait to see this in action. my experience with physics in SL has taught me not to use it AT ALL, PERIOD. should i actually be able to do somethign without it causing major sim crashes i see endless possibilities…
not to mention that the sim im on is haunted by mysterious crashes constantly anyway, so i cant wait to see wether this will improve that situation.
January 19th, 2008 at 6:08 AM
Oh, any possibility of getting - copy / paste - in the rename function of inventory fixed? LOL Sure would be nice to have that available again.
DRD
January 19th, 2008 at 6:44 AM
I have no problem with being listed in any “Early Adopters” list.
Oh, and #96, although the menu copy/paste doesn’t always work, the Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V copy/paste does.
One other curious thing “that works”.. why, when I close a “group” IM session, does it *stay* closed (I see no new chat) until all participants have left the group IM session and a new session is started whereas for others, every new comment re opens the group session IM on them ? Works that way for me on every version of the viewer I use.
January 19th, 2008 at 7:04 AM
@Ryu
Thanks - Big Duh! for me. Too long away from command line….
DRD
January 19th, 2008 at 7:21 AM
Any idea what the target for the mainland is? Or perhaps another way, how long the Early Adopter Program is supposed to last? Or is the length of the program based on meeting certain goals? My take is that is when it will ready for prime time.
Thanks!