Quick Status

The Havok4-based Second Life simulator v1.19.3.82980 has been deployed to the Beta Preview. This version integrates some updates from the release-version simulator on Second Life, and another round of bug fixes.

What Has Changed In This Version?

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Quick Status

The Havok4-based Second Life simulator v1.19.1.82411 has been deployed 559 Early Adopter regions. This version resolves a set of 11 issues listed in the March 14th post describing the recent Havok4 Beta Preview Update. Due to the nature of these fixes, we wanted to allow for some extra test time on the Beta Preview.

Sneak Peek: Upcoming Issue Resolutions that are completed in the next release (…so that you know which items have already been fixed internally, and in the pipeline for our next deploy - but remember the following items are not included in the this update!) (more…)

Quick Status

The Havok4-based Second Life simulator v1.19.1.82355 has been deployed to the Beta Preview. The Early Adopter regions will be updated early next week, after this version has had a few days of testing on the Beta Preview.

What Has Changed In This Version?

Changes in this build include (SVC items were submitted on the public jira issue tracker / DEV items are internally discovered issues / there are a few in this list that were fixed without jira tracking #’s…). (more…)

Quick Status

The Havok4-based Second Life simulator v1.19.1.81747 has been deployed to both the Beta Preview and the over 500 Early Adopter regions. This version resolves 15 of the remaining issues and brings us to the point of having a first release candidate of the simulator. More fixes are still in process - this is not the last build - but we are getting much closer to a version that can be integrated with release and become the next Second Life simulator.

We are getting close to a release-ready version of the new Havok4-based simulator. The team will be continuing to work on issues. I will be posting more information about expected timetables soon (but not with this blog post…)

The team is committed to the quality of this new simulator version, and will be remaining together to work issues after the Havok4 simulator is released to Second Life at large. (We will not practice “release and run” with this simulator, just as you have seen that we do not practice “post and run” on the blog… We’ll still be around ;). We are trying to get the benefits of reduced simulator crash rates out to all of Second Life as soon as it is reasonable, and will clean up lower level issues going forward from that point.

Why Did We Not Deploy This Version To Beta Preview First This Time?

The original plan was to deploy this build to the Beta Preview only, and test it over the weekend before deploying it to the Havok4 Early Adopter regions. As a result of a recent security exploit and the accompanying fix, I decided that it would be better to bypass the Beta Preview period than to leave the exploit “in the wild” with our Early Adopters.

I hope that we have caught any major issues that might be in this build, and that you will understand this decision is based on a security first philosophy, even though it may risk some other problems. If we missed something major, the back-out plan will be to pave over the Havok4 Early Adopter regions with the current Second Life simulator temporarily. I will be on and offline for the next several hours and will be making that call later on tonight (keep this version online or pave it over with the release version).

What Has Changed In This Version?

Changes in this build include (SVC items were submitted on the public jira issue tracker / DEV items are internally discovered issues / there are a few in this list that were fixed without jira tracking #’s…).

*** Resolved security exploit

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Quick Status

537 Early Adopter regions have been updated to Havok4 Beta Server v1.19.0.80517.

This version resolves a set of key issues, and includes a performance optimization that we hope will make a noticeable difference for regions that have many avatars present. See the “What Has Changed In This Version” section below for the specific list of changes deployed today.

This version is the version we started to deploy last week, with the addition of a fix for the problem of not being able to land on some prim surfaces.

What Has Changed In This Version? (more…)

Update  2008-03-06: This refresh has been delayed in order to avoid impacting testing of a current Havok4 build, and to accomodate other uses of the Beta Preview. We currently expect to do this refresh late next week.

This post applies only to the Second Life Beta Preview Grid, and this refresh will have no effect on your normal Second Life user account.

The Beta Preview database, which contains all user account and inventory information for the Havok4 (and Mono) Beta Preview grid, will be refreshed on Monday March 3rd.

This will take the Beta Preview offline for a period of up to 24 hours, and will result in:

* User account list updated so that accounts present on Second Life as of Feb 28, 2008 may log in on the Beta Preview

* User inventory updated to match Second Life inventory as of Feb 28, 2008

Please note that this operation REPLACES any and all inventory and user account information on the Beta Preview, so if you have scripts that you do not want to lose, and they only exist there, please log in and save them before the database refresh starts. In addition, any content placed out in-world on the Beta Preview will be removed by the refresh.

MONO BETA TESTERS:
Mono beta testers need to know a couple of additional details. The recent update to the latest Mono breaks scripts compiled before that update. If you receive this error:

1.2 MONO: Script run-time error
1.2 MONO: System.Security.VerificationException: A system exception has occurred.
at LindenLab.SecondLife.Script.Deserialize (System.Byte[] class_data, System.Byte[] object_data)

… you will need to recompile the script so that it acquires the latest
bytecode.

If you have developed scripts on the beta grid, they will no longer be
in your inventory after Monday’s db refresh. You should copy / paste the
scripts to files on your computer until after the refresh.

Sidewinder Linden
Havok4 Program Manager

The Beta Preview has been updated with a resolution to the “can’t land on some prim surfaces” issue that caused us to pull the last update shortly after it was deployed. Havok4 Beta Server v1.19.0.80517 includes the fixes announced in the previous blog post.

If there are no substantive issues with this version, it will be deployed to the Early Adopter regions this Thursday Feb 28, 2008.

Please note that we are getting much closer to the Havok4 simulator being merged into our release simulator, and becoming the Second Life simulator for the whole Second Life Grid. If you have not tested your products or content on the Havok4 Beta Preview, “now would be the time”. You can participate in the Havok4 Beta in two ways: (more…)

UPDATE 2008-02-22 12:11pm PST: Well… we thought we had the “can’t land on some prim surfaces” problem resolved by backing out some recent changes. Unfortunately testing showed that this misbehavior still exists. We will have to do some more detailed research to locate the cause of this problem.

When we have a working fix, we will deploy the new version the Beta Preview for a day of community testing, and then afterwards re-deploy to the Early Adopter regions on Second Life. I hope that we can find a solution that will let us do a deploy by mid-week next week, but cannot be sure until we isolate the cause of the problem.

UPDATE 2008-02-21 6:44pm PST: Due to a problem found in the first hour of use in which avatars could not exit flying mode when trying to land on some surfaces, we have reverted the Early Adopter regions and the Beta Preview to the previous version. We will locate the source of this issue, and re-deploy with an updated version as soon as possible. /Sidewinder

Quick StatusThe Beta Preview and 515 Early Adopter regions have been updated to Havok4 Beta Server v1.19.0.80183. Yes, we have over 500 Havok4 Early Adopters (almost 3% of Second Life regions)!

This version resolves another set of key issues, and includes a performance optimization that we hope will make a noticeable difference for regions that have many avatars present. See the “What Has Changed In This Version” section below for the specific list of changes deployed today.

Over the next week we will be deciding on the final integration schedule for our Havok4-based simulator to become the standard Second Life simulator used across the Second Life Grid. I am sure that this statement will raise some questions - here are a few answers to questions that I have been asked in this area: (more…)

Quick Status

The Beta Preview and 490 Early Adopter regions have been updated to Havok4 Beta Server v 1.19.0.79818, including a variety of important issue resolutions.

Since the start of the beta process, I have been carefully setting expectations with regards to vehicles, since we knew that they “really didn’t work right” with early builds. With this version we have crossed that major hurdle, and as far as we can tell, vehicles now have functionally correct behavior.

In other words, with this release, all vehicles that we know of (which clearly isn’t all of them on Second Life - but is a reasonably large subset) will rez, you can pilot them (float, drive, fly) and their actions should operate as expected, both for regular and mouselook steering (for vehicles that support mouselook steering). However, it is still likely that you will see some “speeds and feeds” differences on Havok4 - for instance somewhat different running speeds or turning speeds.

What Has Changed In This Version? (more…)

A rolling restart of the 490 Havok4 Early Adopter regions is about to begin, to deploy a new version of the simulator code. The update process will likely take an hour or two to complete for all regions, but each region should only be offline for a couple of minutes when restarted. I will post another blog entry when the update is complete, including the full list of issues resolved with this new version.

To see if your version has been updated, stand somewhere on the region, and choose “About Second Life…” from the Help menu. The fourth line of text will look like this if the region has completed the update:

“Havok4 Beta Server” “1.19.0.79818″

Regards,

Sidewinder Linden
Havok4 Program Manager