LL becoming agile?

With the recent sudden appearance and suprisingly quick development of stuff like the push restriction, snapshot system and upcoming group options it begs the question... have LL become agile? The frequent updates seem to have moved them away from huge, lumbering undertaking like Havok 2 and actually bring us some meaningful rapid developments.

Note this is not to be confused with issues like bugs or stability, this is purely from a features perspective.

I wish people would stop clapping and drooling over the future implementation of havok 2 within the next 10 years when if you take a good hard look, Havok is now up to what? 6?

Bleeding edge my ass.

You should have two teams working any MMO software project. Bug Fixers and minor changemakers (We updated the snapshot system!). And then the big mamajamma's the ones that implement havock 80,000 and a rendering system younger than doom.

Only Havok 4, so far.

As far as agility goes, I suppose. Not very graceful though, always knocking things over and breaking them.

it does seem that way, which is nice. i guess getting rid of the PvP reports freed up a few lindens to do other things

Sadly most people hate it. But it's still a feature.

The imporant question is... is Havok more needed than other features they wanted to give us. How many people would Havok help vs other features.

1. Mono
2. html on a prim.
3. skype/voice integration (i thought i heard at a town house meeting).

Right now the physics seem to work ok. But the three above would have a much broader appeal imho.

What do you need physics or better scripting, better displaying of web stuff and phone sex?

Now that's just cold, man. Unreal Tourney Classic at least.

Well, I am certainly looking forward to the long-awaited improvements in land management tools and group tools, and especially to the increase in the number of groups you can belong to. But I would hardly call their efforts in implementing these changes 'Agile'. They were supposed to have been ready months ago.

But for most of the rest of these 'improvements'? Pifft! Put 'em back on the shelf and fix the system so that the CURRENT features work! Like, maybe, textures that load fast and cache properly? Clothes textures that don't fuzz out after a minute or so, never to return? Having textures load starting with what is right next to you, and not at random locations half a sim away? Or here's a really novel idea! Like, maybe, put more work and effort in on ways to reduce lag, without making small things right next to you vanish at random?

HTML on a prim? Heck of a good idea, but worthless if the texture on the prim won't load in the first place!

Yes, I would settle for texture on a prim right now.

Nice one Io!

Agile? Senile more like it!

A lot of these are due to limitations of the shittastic rendering/caching system SL currently uses.

So I wouldn't mind to terribly for a new version of Havok and a new rendering engine. There comes a point when you can only improve so far on the base clientside engine before you eventually have to write an entire new one in order to get things to where you want it.

A new engine would fix a lot of the rendering issues, new havok would fix a lot of the physics issues et al. Developing new stuff and bug fixing CAN be the same thing sometimes. Its just rare

My quip was, "Well, gee, they have gotten more agile. They dodge questions and prim bullets rather easily. Comes from all that practice!"

Seriously, I think they need to lay off the new features and take a serious look at the overworked asset system. Staring at grey prims and half-rezzed skins gets really old.. until I started using my imagination. Now, those grey prims are BFGs to use against the midlevel boss, Philip, while battling my way through the griefers to get to the real boss, Torley!

I think they stated that they officially switched to an agile programming methologogy (aka xtreme programming!) back after the 1.8 launch.

Mono and Havok are about equal in importance. HTML on a prim is a cool idea, but I think someone else already pointed out that there are plenty of problems with getting textures to load on prims, and most people would probably like to see that sorted out before yet another feature is added in that regard. (Fundamentals should work well before glitzy stuff like HTML-on-prim is added.) Skype/voice integration, maybe, but what is there to integrate about Skype?

I'd like to see Mono and Havok ASAP. Mono, so that scripts don't run so dern slow, and Havok so that we could be done with some of the deep think/sim crash issues, and enjoy improved region crossing, especially on vehicles. A Havok upgrade is one of the first things necessary to implement a much more robust sim handoff, which Andrew Linden spoke about in SL Answers (he mentioned some kind of journalling system that would need a newer version of Havok than 1.0.)

1. Mono would be much needed, if it does bring the 40-100x speedup. Mono was 'getting close, but needs some finishing' a couple of months ago. Or maybe half a year ago?

2. HTML on a prim: 'almost done, only big thing not working is interactions with Flash elements' -- come on! Either this is a blatant lie (i think so), or Flash is that super-important (i think not)

3. skype/voice integration: I don't miss this at all. It could be useful at times, but certainly not in the usual place where you have about 20 ppl. around and chatting. If 20 ppl. voiced (that's not even possible if voice is P2P, I think, requires too much up bandwidth), all you could hear is noise, many ppl. chatting, until you turn the voice thing off.
Not to mention all the funny accents, some of which are probably not too understandable. So while voice might be okay, I don't really miss it. And it can't be logged, either... And if it's recorded, it'll become non-browsable, only if someone transcribes it.

Well that settles it. Zonax thinks something is a blatant lie. The debate is now over.


Who said talking out yer ass was a lost art?

Heck, I'd settle for my clothes rezzing in a timely manner personally. Last night was the first time I can say it was painful. Got some new stuff, tried it on, it got halfway rezzed and stayed there. Numerous changes, relogging, clearing cache and relogging, changing again and I finally got a few peices to show properly. :/

I was getting heavy packet loss, so I'm not sure if that is my end or server though.

I want to add a bit to what Huns rightly pointed out. Whether you believe physics are working "okay" or not, I don't think people in general realize how important a roll Havok plays in the system as a whole. Whether an object is marked "Physical" or not, it is under the purview of Havok for collision detection and more. Prim limits, linking distance limits and more are all affected by Havok. The big problem is Second Life was built upon the linux version of Havok 1, an initial release and not as tested (and therefore debugged). Any major first release of a plug-in architecture is bound to take a quantum leap in subsequent revisions as companies and individuals actually put the component to work. This is especially true of Havok 2 which took what was learned and rolled out the new version with features and optimizations in a fairly aggressive update schedule. For people who do not also use game consoles, there have been dozens of Xbox and PS2 titles to use Havok 2, and this is on years-old hardware that is no match for the types of processors running the Second Life simulation servers.

I agree that Mono would be a huge leap, but am less concerned given the fact that Mono is currently out-of-date (.NET 2.0 launched over a year ago, Mono is based on .NET 1.1) and there are a number of alternative strategies Linden Lab could go with to decouple custom scripts from extended server-side features. A concept I particularly hoped for was class objects with extended parameters.

Finally, voice can be implemented many ways, and would always be an option. I would love proximity voice, the type people have suggested here that would cause bandwidth and social issues, but it is only one part of a voice solution. Everything from voice messaging, on-on-one VM sessions as an alternative to IMs, and of course Group Voice chat can all operate outside of the simulator. Voice can be complicated, but generally only the social as opposed to performance aspects. You can worry about the overlap of 20 people talking, but this is the same as in real life. Voice support on Xbox Live can lead to this same problem, 16 people in a chat lobby talking over each other. What happens? Usually people stop talking over each other or leave the room. People screaming? The power of mute. I would hope social issues don't preclude adding an exciting feature that is now the norm in many environments.

Havok 2 would be an awesome addition, no doubt. but you made a point about consoles with primitive hardware running havok 2 games and such, this is true, how ever with SL its a bit differnt. Secondlife is more than a physics engine, its also a building engine, a scripting engine, ect. which is one of the reasons why its so popular, but its also a reason why its a resource hog. its like playing HL2, 3d studio max (okay so our building isnt that good but yeah) with microsoft C++ all running on one box doing differnt things, sure our version is alot more watered down than all of these but you get the idea. each of these platforms needs to beable to enteract with one another, and function like one single game, which is what i suspect is behind the delays with adding any new feature into SL.

I think we need to use a different physics engine then havok IMO. As i have studied the engine by using both SL and TES Oblivion. I find this engine to be very unstable. Crank up the push in oblivion on some lightning spell like fingers of the mountain and you end up blasting chandeleers all over the place. they knock against the ceiling repeativly and never stop. Once i walked into a house and used a lightning spell and sent a old lady and man flying into the wall into very strange positions while their shelf contents ended up all over the place. You can literely bump into a shelf and send a bowl hurling against a far wall. O.o

The best implementation of physics in a game so far is Half Life 2 which uses... Havok. Seemingly implementation of the system is just as important as the actual system.

I'd like to see multithreading, mono and havok, with perhaps mono being the most important. I think it's pretty safe to say that whilst the hardware has improved the average scripting load on simulators has increased, more brute force won't solve inefficiency.