When does the Havok 4 engine come out?

lolllll!!! welcome to the club, friend - you're getting the hang of it all pretty quickly then...

It depends who you ask.

Before H4, my mainland home used to seem like it would crash almost every day. Since they rolled out H4, 6+ weeks ago, I think I've seen it crash maybe once or twice.

Yeah, I got a new hugger because the old one was a little flakey and made one person bounce up an down about an inch sometimes. Aside from the lack of crashing on a regular basis, that's the only difference I've noticed. Small price to pay, IMO.


I don't think it's as much steep as it is long. Unless you're scripting or doing uberbuilds, nothing in SL is very hard to understand - there's just a whole lot of little things.

The Current Havok engine is 5.5 ...4 is about 2 years old now.

Also Havok say's they are going to release a version 6.0 this summer which is supposed to be a major rewrite / update to the whole engine which will bring it up to what you see in the latest unreal 3.0 and other modern engines.

So maybe next big thing will be a Havok 6.0 upgrade .... in a year or two.

Most of the Havok 4 upgrade was getting us "closer to current" so that the next upgrade won't be such a massive change. I think the idea was that they could then spoonfeed us new updates as they became available. But H4 implementation has been in the works for quite some time.

Mono, a new Virtual Machine for the Scripting engine, is on the horizon, it's nearing completion on the Beta grid, tenative date for Main Grid release is first week of June. It promises a 100-300 times speed increase over the current LSL script VM. (and delivers)

There are other things on the horizon, but are mostly still in the planning stages, Navigation and Landmarks program, HTML on a prim that is interactive, Avatar Puppeteering, Dynamic Shadows, and on and on and on.

That doesn't even begin to get into the Architecture Working Group, and all their initiatives to make a system for Independent grids to be interconnected and 'compatible' with each other. I would suggest checking into the Linden Office hours where Representatives from LL meet on a regular basis with interested parties to discuss various initiatives. You can find a listing here:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Office_Hours

guess I'm just bouncing between too many places where I still get the "server is running a different version" msg... and lack of sleep when I posted

Yes you can. The objects have to be nonphysical, though, same as before. You may just have run into some hard objects.

I thought this was DOA since Altrumia's departure?

We're several server releases into Havoc 4 on the Main Grid now--I've kinda lost track how many--so, seeing the "different version" warning doesn't mean you can escape H4.

Did anyone menton that H4 gave us the 4096 build ceiling? That's a pretty big deal to me, at least.

And the H4 sims are *remarkably* more stable. It was kind of fun watching a self-replicator and a steady rain of those DeLUSiON cubes pelting down and bouncing around Linden village while the sim time dilation plummeted all the way to... 0.95.

About Mono, perhaps the most important feature--more important than the performance improvement, IMHO--is a kind of simple change in architecture that plugs a very serious security vulnerability in the old LSL2 approach. ('Nuff said.)

(I'm very much less excited about the upcoming NAV landmarks stuff, but I've already voiced my ambivalence about that project more than I even care.)

It's my understanding it's been shelved, but I don't think it's dead. Sooner or later it will happen.

Havok 4 feels pretty much the same to me, except that my Swimmer is broken. This is an ongoing irritation... I live on the waterfront, I really miss swimming, and I haven't heard of any other still-working devices that are as good as the Swimmer was.

There are a few aspects of the avatar mesh that I'd like to see improved, but not if it'd mean all my clothes suddenly became unwearable.... I have a huge number of Dazzle/Last Call outfits that I'd hate to lose.

How do you do that?

Altruima, not Altrumia, I believe.

Create a flat prim, say, 2m x 2m x 1cm, and move it into your avatar at shoulder height. That should press you down into the ground. When you move it or delete it, you're shot out of the ground.
You can play around with pressing yourself further down by lowering the prim in steps. Different heights give different results. Post your records

Correct. I misspelled.



I agree - though the SLwim (which was recommended to me on these boards) seems to do a pretty fair job.

Mari

Havok 4 was a HUGE improvement in my sim. We had frequent crashes that have gone away since H4. Also, we run a lot of scripts in the sim. Before H4, we were always slightly above what the sim could handle without slowing the scripts. With the improved physics calculations (even though we never had many physical objects other than avatars), the sim can usually handle everything without slowing the scripts at all. Whenever MONO gets implemented and we get new MONO versions of our main scripted items, we should be able to add a lot of things to the sim and run faster than ever.

And the swimmer and boats available at my place have always worked under H4 with no updates needed. One of the jumping dolphins is behaving a little differently, but the creator is working on it.

JJ Ventrella finished the puppeteering project but it hasn't yet been integrated.

I am also having dificulties now with the new update of Havok 4. I am just curious why they would name it so closely to another word . . . Havoc which has the following meanings.

hav·oc: [hav-uhk]:

1. great destruction or devastation; ruinous damage.
–verb (used with object)
2. to work havoc upon; devastate.
–verb (used without object)
3. to work havoc: The fire havocked throughout the house.
—Idioms
4. cry havoc, to warn of danger or disaster.
5. play havoc with,
a. to create confusion or disorder in: The wind played havoc with the papers on the desk.
b. to destroy; ruin: The bad weather played havoc with our vacation plans.




It just confuses me on the choice of this word. Sighs!

That's a very deliberate pun, and likely also a change to allow the company to trademark the name, since "havoc" is a common word.
Havok (http://www.havok.com/) is a 3rd party company who has developed a component to be plugged into others' games, doing all the physical calculations of pushing objects around and having them tumble amongst each other, i.e. creating havoc in the game world.
It is well known and commonly used in high-profile games.

Dat's a big one on my want list. Maybe not as high as "better trees," but pretty darn high.

Mari