Havoc 4 Early Adopter Program

==========From the LL Blog: ===============
Announcing the Havok4 Early Adopter Program
Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 3:10 PM PST by: Sidewinder Linden

Several months ago public beta testing of “the project you thought would never ever get finished” was announced - the project to update Second Life with the Havok4 physics engine. For more information about the Havok4 project, please see the Havok4 Beta Wiki.

Announcing the Havok4 Early Adopter Program
The Havok4 Early Adopter Program allows private island owners to “opt-in”, and choose to switch to Havok4-based Second Life regions.

Forty regions in Second Life are already using the beta Havok4-based Second Life simulator. So far, the results have been promising, and we have been resolving issues and updating the simulator programming on a regular basis.

One of our early testers said:
“… and THAT is why I love Havok 4… We get griefed, the sim doesn’t even *blink*, and it takes ten seconds to clean up.. I’ve seen commercials that last longer.”

A Few Things To Know
If you opt in to the Early Adopter Program, we will switch any regions you choose, of those that you own, to run the beta Havok4-based version of the Second Life simulator. Please note that you will likely find things that don’t work as expected - the point of this program is to find the remaining oddities before we roll the new version of Second Life out to the rest of Second Life!

In particular, there are issues currently being worked on with:
* vehicle actions (some vehicles work well, while others do “odd things” or do not behave as expected)
* physics tuning to adjust the behavior of scripted objects
* performance optimization
* other bugs that present different behaviors on Havok4 than the current Havok1 server

By opting in to the program, you are committing to work with us as we work through the final clean-up of this new version of Second Life simulator code, and to keep the new version on your region as we work through resolving any issues that you find.

How You Can Opt-In
1) The Early Adopter Program is limited to the first 300 region requests that we receive, and will be fullfilled in the order received. Opt-in early if you want to participate!
2) You must be a private island owner to opt-in to the Havok4 Early Adopter program.
3) Log in on the http://secondlife.com/support/ page
4) Click the “Submit a Ticket” link
5) Please use the following settings for your new ticket:
* Ticket Type: “Land and Region Issues”
Region Request: “Region Change”
Region Change: “Havok4 Early Adopter Program”



Concierge request to opt-in to the Havok4 Early Adopter Program


How to Report Bugs
If you find a Havok4 simulator problem, please create an item in the public issue tracker at http://jira.secondlife.com/. You can tell if you are in a region running Havok4 by choosing Help > About Second Life in the viewer.

If the fourth text line reads “Havok4 Beta Server”, then you are in a region running Havok4. If the fourth text line reads “Second Life Server”, then you are in a region running our earlier Havok1 simulator.

To submit a Havok4 bug:
1) Log in to the https://jira.secondlife.com/ page with your Second Life avatar name and password.
2) Click “Create New Issue”
3) Set PROJECT to “2 Second Life Service - SVC” and ISSUE TYPE to “Bug”
4) On the next page, type step-by-step instructions for how to create the problem, and if specific products are involved include the product vendor name and specific product name and version.
5) VERY IMPORTANT: Please set COMPONENTS = “Physics” and AFFECTS VERSIONS = “Havok4 Beta”. If you do not choose these settings, the Havok4 team may not see your bug report for a while!

For a demo of the jira public issue tracker, see Torley’s great video “how to report a bug“. Again, please be sure to set COMPONENTS = “Physics” and AFFECTS VERSIONS = “Havok4 Beta”!

Thanks in advance for helping to test the next generation Second Life simulator. We really appreciate your help in making Second Life better.

As we resolve issues and get closer to a version for release to the Second Life Grid, we will be deploying updated versions to our Early Adopter regions.

Best regards,

Sidewinder Linden
Program Manager

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 3:10 PM PST and is filed under Announcements & News, Beta Test Grid, Bugs & Fixes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

=============== the above is from the LL blog ==================

I. am. so. on. board. with. this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111111111

Erm, until Ordinal finds out about it...

<shifts eyes>

...

Requested:


historic Caledon, standard class 4

Caledon SteamSkyCity, standard class 5

Caledon Cymru, openspace class 5 (Duchy of First Sea Lord Viderian Vollmar)


Bring your aero fleet, your sailcraft, your physical gunships... I'll announce the instant I see an upgrade! It's going to be interesting, folks!

Just in case you have to add OpenSpace sims in groups of four, feel free to include Nova Civis Caledon on that list.

I am so not on board with this, I only have one island and I can't afford to risk my customer's having a dodgy time well other than the general Sl risks of them having a dodgy time that is!

I shall do if that's the case, Carl - I just didn't want to be greedy. Taking 1% of signups... yeah, but taking over 10% of the 300 offered were I to sign up all of Caledon - probably not cool.

A lot of openspace region crew really wanted to do this, but Viderian did 17 laps for cancer research at RFL last year, and a bunch of other cool things that weren't crowed from the rooftops. Just quiet, no-thanks-or-recognition-asked-for decency. I know he wanted to check this out, so it was the least I could do to add that region.

Due to the quiet early testing program, I know Havok4 isn't particularly, obviously lethal - I don't think we'll see anything fatal, and Caledon's got a bit of a war chest in case things do go boom. I'd take care of folks *rather well* in the event of disaster; I think everyone knows that.

I signed up yesterday and got my notice this morning that The Botanical Gardens is now running on Havok4. Seems to be fine - sky is NOT falling and all appears normal. I will probably put up a sign at the main entry to the sim to let people know and ask them to contact me for bug reports or with anything not working correctly.

Caledon SteamSkyCity and Caledon Cymru both have it now.

Though not historic Caledon (at this time). Not sure why, but 2 outta 3 ain't bad - maybe they didn't get to it, maybe class 4 is an issue, maybe there was a lot of demand for regions.

It *does* feel smoother to me... if that makes any sense!

I can't find anything wrong with it so far.

*frowns*

A problem has been found requiring the test sims to be changed back to Havoc 1.

A new Havoc 4 version is expected later this week.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/01/19/havok4-early-adopter-program-region-conversions-delayed/

Well, when I did find it wrong, I didn't find things to be so much wrong, but much more to be gone

The unlinked propellers were a bit irritating at first and the missing floor prims did make walking a bit problematic at times. but I bet the physics was much smoother

(but when I met the demise of the floors in steam sky city, the sim itself actually was allready back to Havoc 1, since I didn't get the different-server-popup and my mystitool did actually stop instead of make me going on and on and on with flight assist active ...)

Yeah, I posted that before I saw the damage

Barney did emergency repairs; I still have to replace some of the upper deck walkways, though I'm rather liking the more 'open' look in a way. Right now I'm contemplating a landing strip suspended over the upper deck to encourage vehicle visits.

Seems people tended to come in a little too 'hot' on the hangar landings. It's easy to miss the bay door opening, and that isn't good... *splat* @_@

So, Des & Barney, the sim changed to Havok 4 and that made some prims disappear, which didn't reappear when it went back to Havok1? You sure it wasn't a poltergeist that likes steam?

Serra told me she had prim returns in Winterfell at the same time - a non-Havok4 region, so... I'm thinking it may not be a causal relationship.

We'll just have to persevere and carry on to find out, I suppose...

Now that we are seeing Havok4 on the main grid, and know with certainty that it breaks some of our scripts, has any way been identified for determining whether a given region is running Havok4?

In some cases, our scripts appear to be underpowered with respect to push in havok4 sims, and if we could identify the situation we could adjust the push power. This would allow us to have roughly the same power in havok1 and havok4 sims.

Any ideas on how to identify the type of physics running in a region?

Help menu > About Second Life...

The fourth line says Havok 4 Beta if you're in an early adopter sim.


One of my clients had three sims that were switched over. In one, there was a football stadium, comprised of just over 1000 prims, that had ben sold to the client and locked in place over a week ago. Parts of that stadium got returned to me, as Creator, as having "gone off world", even though I didn't own those parts. They had to revert to the non-Havok 4 server and roll the sim back to undo the damage.

If you're wearing an AO, expect to trip over curbs as low as 0.15 Meters tall. That's a 6 inch step. Sheesh...

The only things I've been noticing are that movement is very jerky when walking, slow turns, failure to stop, etc... Flight devices perform sketchy at high altitudes also.

Jopsy's gondolas are having de-rez issues, which may be a bug.

Is there a way to tell if a region has been switched to havok4? I see some of the Caledon regions in this thread, but not sure flying around in my out of this world ships would be welcomed in 19th Century Caledon

If you've been switched to Havoc 4, it causes it you to get 503 errors when you try to use the sl website.




First time I hit reply I got a 503 error. I must be on Havoc 4. I don't even own a sim.


Note: there is some ambiguity in the use of the phrase "503 errors". The error message number is 503, but that's a coincidence, if you use the SL website for any significant length of times you will rapidly enough get 503 errors and more.

Unlike many other places we don't discriminate like that - you *can* dress how you want, drive, fly, sail what you want. We'll look upon your UFO or whatever as 'from the future' most likely

As I understand it, only Caledon Cymru is presently Havok4 enabled - we *did* help discover some glitches alright. Which means: test success!

A report from my experience last night on my rental island(s) - which have started using the new Havok 4 engine.

(This isn't a new viewer thingie, so doesn't go into that forum, and well where do I put this? So I did a search and found this thread; by the way, I was using the latest Windlight Release Candidate viewer while on the islands that had Havok 4 physics engine engaged; on a side note, why are the "residential" filling up with shops (South Island) and capture roleplay spacestation destinations? (North island)).

1) Flying: Trying to fly . . . no vehicle - just flying. I'm like a drunk on speed up there. And so hard to control myself. And banging my head against skyplatforms. eh.

2) Cars: I cannot drive my cars anymore. One kept flipping over anytime I tried to do anything. I attempt to move forward and . . aaaahhh I'm driving upside down! . . . nnooooo. Ok, let's try another car - ok, if I go slow enough I can drive . . oops, I just somehow hit something and I'm spinning madly in the air and now upside down.

3) Stability: Ok, so I was playing with Crazod with weapons and sim crossings, the things that cause either sim crashes, or avatar crashes, and neither of us crashed once. The car kept crushing us, and the daleks (I think?) were acting goofy, but neither of us crashed.