65k Online Breakdown

Havok 5.5 coming??? I heard a rumor it was, and at the Crash me sim, again it was a topic of discussion. Havok 4 is a great improvement, but it miscalculates movement and rounds up equations indefinitley..

Anyone know of 5.5 coming, anyone else heard the rumor??

I find this very hard to believe. After all the effort they put into making havok 4 work. Why would they change to havok 5.5 so soon?

I'll believe it when I see it.

Possibly because the step from 4 to 5.5 is going to be a lot easier than from Havok 1 to 4, and we should try to keep up rather than keeping Havok 4 for another 5 years til Havok 12 is out then squeeling about sudden change when we jump to Havok 8.

Exactly, why not now and in little jumps. Makes much more sense than to wait 2 years and have to work so hard to implement it. But, I wasnt proposing it was coming, I was ASKING if anyone else heard anything, hence the question marks (??)

The reason Havok 4 took so long was that they were adding a whole layer of abstraction into the physics engine so that updates to future physics engines (not necessarily Havok) should be a lot easier.

Basically the abstraction process in this case involves looking at all the physics functions they need, and writing an API that reflects this. These are the functions that the simulator will then call. Now in order to add a new physics engine all they have to do (not that it isn't still tricky I should say!) is implement these basic functions using whatever features are available in the engine, at which point it can simply be swapped in instead of whatever they had before. Of course this makes it sound simpler than it is, as any change to the physics engine can result in unexpectedly changed behaviour that has to be tweaked to be as close as possible to how it was before, or a decision made to drop old-behaviour in favour of new higher-performance/better behaviour, which isn't a quick process.

Anyway, the physics engine is highly unlikely to be the reason the huge concurrency seen last-night (I saw 68,000, it may have risen further) caused issues. The main points of failure are the centralised services that are shared by the entire grid, namely the database servers and asset servers. If they become bogged down then everyone suffers.

Ah, enlightenment! I never thought about it that way.
Though if LL wished to stay on the forefront of physics, surely they would wait until Havok 6.0 is released?
Last I heard, Havok 6.0 should be released either this month or next.

this last sunday we had 69.5 plus a little more online..WOW..wish it would have hit 70...and the best was, I could still tp around, buy stuff and rezz stuff..maybe they already implemented HavoK 5.5 and are just keeping thier mouths shut so if something goes wrong we dont know what to blame..anyways..keep up the good work Linden Gods, lovin it

Havok has nothing to do with concurrancy numbers and hasn't since before I joined SL..

Being on the cutting edge is overrated, a version behind for 6 months is safer

NOT CORRECT:::Havok does have to do with the stability of the physics, script running programs and the over stability of the engines running the graphics and grid, therfor making it very responsible in the numbers we are seeing, it plays a huge role, put back in Havok2 and you will not see those concurrancy numbers...

Concurrency broke 61K back in January when we were still on Havok 1 (SL skipped 2 and 3). Eight months later, with most Havok 4 kinks worked out, it still hasn't broken the 70K barrier yet. It hasn't made much difference in that area at all.

Havok 4 allows more people into a single simulator with less time wasted, and more reliably, however there are more than enough simulators to handle 70,000 users online at once even if we were still on Havok 1. The main benefit of Havok 4 is that the simulator program spends less time processing physics so is more responsive in other areas, and it is less likely to crash.

LL is generally extremely slow with server related updates(mono,havok 4) so its highly unlikiely that they introduce 5.5 anytime soon.