This is H4 Week: Are You Ready?

I was at CG Linden's Office Hours today and he said that 10% of the grid (10 racks = 410 hosts = 1600 or so regions) is running h4 now.

He also announced that we expect about 20-30% of the grid to use h4 by end of today, and 100% of the grid will be on Havok4 by Thursday.

From what I've seen of Havok4 in SL, I'm happy about it, even though a few scripters won't be...

I'm looking forward to it

I'm *sorta* ready. I've test-driven most of the vehicles I own (Privateer Space ships, My UFO and Rocket Scooter from Lumiere Noir, and a toy style helicopter, and most worked fine under Havok4 (all but the helicopter). I am concerned about my "Swimmer," as it has not worked right for me under Havok 4. I'm also unsure about hug-type attachments -- but I suspect these will work themselves out.

By all means, I'm ready as I'll ever be.

Mari

Is it intentional Irony that H4 week has April Fools day in it?

Very few

yeah yeah


April Fools to you too

Since I have no idea what it means, I will do what I always do when something new comes about. I will turn off my computer, disconnect the modem and cower in a corner until it's all over.

Can anyone give me a list or a link to show why exactly scripters will be unhappy?

stock up on crackers and candles.

What difference will this make to regular avis? How will this impact me who does no scripting and extremely minimal building? Will this affect my attachments? WILL MY WINGS WORK!!!????

I've found that to be a very excellent policy when LL springs something Big and New myself.

Will this affect how far pies can be thrown and their relative impact strength?

I have neither a list or a link but I do know that certain physical behaviors have changed. Some slight, some more than slight.

Havoc1 had a lot of bugs in it, and some of those bugs allowed scripted objects to do things which should not have been possible. Many of those bugs are fixed and do not exist in Havoc4. Products which either purposely exploit those havoc1 bugs will either have to be rewritten from scratch or perhaps thrown out and replaced, depending on what they do exactly. Products which accidentally worked due to a havoc1 bug will probably need to be tweaked or fixed, so that they continue to work.

Example: I have a line of flying machines, which worked in havoc1 and which worked in havoc4 up until RC3 was introduced on Saturday night. At that time, my flying machines fell out of the sky like bricks. It turned out that I had scripted them in such a way that worked, but was not 'technically' supposed to. So Sunday morning I figured out what had changed, fixed all my flying machines, updated all my vendors and my update-server.

I'd also like to mention how great the havoc4 team has been - I mentioned an issue I was experiencing in one of the blogs last week, and Sidewinder and Andrew both came to visit me and have a look at it in world. They've all been amazing as far as working with people and being genuinely interested and concerned with how this turns out.

Honestly, if any builders/scripters out there get a nasty surprise this week, it's their own fault for not preparing more. It's been 6 months after all.

-Atashi

You can now throw megaprim pies that are 40x40x40m and they will now splat without crashing the sim.

ha ha...April Fools Day...I forgot. No, no, this came "straight from the horses mouth", and CG isn't known to kid around about Release Clients! ...if this was an April Fools' Joke, I would be very unhappy.

And one of the definitions for Havoc (which is just too close to Havok) is "violent and needless disturbance" - and that is usually what happens to our world these days when SL gives us anything new.

Aley even got paranoid about her ships since she tried one out in some other H4 sim and it wouldn't hover at all. I let her know that Kuula was part of the upgrade last night so we tried them there with out issues. (^_^)

We did find a bug with them being phantom so they were able to pass through the ground but our avatars would be blocked by prims. I turned phantom off on my copy and it behaved quite well... Then we both turned phantom back on, flew under the NCI mainstage and had people trying to find where we were chatting from. (^_^)y

http://sluniverse.com/pics/pic.aspx?id=266087&sort=Pictures.PictureID+desc&Name=Imnotgoing+Sideways

Aley had Privateer Space turned into a H4 early adopter a couple weeks ago, which really helped with the stability. An ya, they're phantom and temporary for reasons she puts in the Space Bug owner manual. Makes sense, but less of an issue if yer using them outside of P.S.

Mari

True... It turns out that the versions of H4 have been different from one place to the next up until this weeks upgrade. When Privateer got upgraded from the 'adopter' to the 'release' version (I don't know the number stuff) Aley was left making a TON of fixes to keep P-S functional. I was able to distract her for a while by getting her to help me on my own little space ship build. I'm sure other people are having just as much fun right now. (^_^)

Ok question...


How does the release of Havoc4 impact on the RC viewer currently available? I ask because I use the RC viewer exclusively and it is unclear whether the upgrade to Havoc4 will render the RC client viewer useless with the main grid.

I'll do what I must.....if I have to ditch the RC (and windlight *sob*) I will..... but if that is NOT the case......how will this impact the bahavior or the RC viewer?

My home sim is on H4 now, and I run fine, and use ONLY the RC.

I have noticed a few crashes, but it's my belief that it's from me moving my camera in ways that SL doesn't approve.. like 'up'

According to the blog they started rolling the Havok4 stuff out yesterday and there were no corresponding comments about specific viewers. Since the Havok4 changes are more related to 'physics' inworld, I'm not sure the viewer would be impacted at all.

The two are not related. Your RC viewer will continue to work fine. I use the RC viewer most of the time as well and one of my regions is already on the 1.20.whatever havoc4 release, there's no (new havoc4 related) problems with the RC viewer in the new simulator software. All the normal SL problems we know and love, remain equally uneffected.

-Atashi

Thank goodness. I was worried that my SL world might suddenly get better.

Is there a good forum post, blog post, or article somewhere that explains what Havok4 is? I understand it's something relating to the server-side simulator code but that's all I know. People seem optimistic that it will increase grid stability - I'd love to be directed to some basic information about why that is too.

I'm not any kind of programmer, but I'd love to read something that would give me a basic sense of what this change to SL actually is. I'm not asking anyone to write me a book about it, especially if the information is already out there - just some help finding out about it.