1.8 Already?

welcome new round of bugs about to show up

Perhaps someday they will fix all the old bugs, but not today.

I don't see this as a step in the right direction frankly. I think they need to fix existing bugs then move forward. Masking the problems with new bells and whistles does not thrill me one bit.

Fix your product.

Lots of old bugs got fixed in 1.7 as they also did with 1.6, 1.8 is more of a feature test release of p2p

How far off is havok 2, anyway.

Actually, I'm all for new features and less bug fixing or one day people will be using a photorealistic neural-connected VR from SL's competitors, while we'll still waiting for Havok 2.0 to be implemented...

Jokes aside, there must be a trade-off in "bug fixing" vs. "new features". Right now at this moment, 1.7.4 is at the stage where 90% of the users have a 90% smooth "ride" on SL. This is pretty impressive, if you take into account that a huge amount of the problems are simply incorrectly configured computers, just because most people are not (and should not be) computer-savvy enough.

(A simple example: how many of you know how to tweak your Windows [or Mac] TCP/IP stack, to have it work for broadband instead of the default, a modem connection? Guess what — it can give you a 50-200% improvement in loading textures if you have a connection which is completely free of packet-loss)

It's not as if SL shouldn't be working for un-configured, old, outdated, incorrectly updated, unstable, or simply incompatible computers as well. It should. Other platforms work on those, so SL should work as well.

Also, many bugs are not related to your computer at all. Yes, they should be fixed, once and for all. But the "universal bugs" — the ones that affect everybody, no matter what their computer is, and not just a few — should definitely be eliminated from the code before new features are introduced.

According to some residents, LL is now entering a new model. They have 15 developers on several teams, working on lots of projects at the same time. Previously, when a large part of those projects were ready to be launched, they would get their code together, and release a new "major" version. This has been the downfall of past releases — the new code would interfere with each developer's code and give out completely unforeseen results. So it seems that the new model will be: more "major" releases, but with far less new radical features, just a couple of them. Then bugs get fixed on the minor releases, some team finishes their work, and you get a new "major" release. The idea will be to get new major releases quickly and more often, but without introducing too many features at the same time.

How exactly this will work out in the near future — well, we have an opportunity to ask the Lindens on the upcoming Town Hall meeting with the Project Management Team!

Last time Andrew Linden told us, "it's halfway there".

According to the oldest residents, he has been saying that since Beta. I.e. early 2003.

It WAS halfway there, twice! It is currently on hold again... sorta.

The problem has been that the Havok-2 work takes too long for the attention span of the LL collective conciousness. The reason it takes too long is because of spagetti code which is incompatibile with Havok-2 API and which takes a lot of time to clean up.

My new strategy will be to break the project up into smaller parts and include them in the more frequent 'major' releases that we expect to start releasing. Eventually the Havok-2 work will be small enough to actually fit within the LL development cycle.

So I'll soon be working to unravel most of the spagetti. The good news is that some cleaned code is already going out in 1.8 (but not cleaned by me) which is totally under the hood, and I've got a big chunk of untangled code already done in the stale Havok-2 branch that just needs to be ported forward into 1.9.

So basically, when you're done cleaning up, that will mean we won't have to wait another 3 years for Havok 3 or whatever comes next?

I'm looking forward to unspaghetied code, because that'll also mean SL developpment will be far faster too!

In the meantime, let's sacrifice another newbie tonight, to please the spaghetti monster:
Church of the flying spaghetti Monster

Smells like Zeno's Paradox!