Physics Changes being made? (not a havok 2/3 question)

Hello,
Have any changes been made to in world physics recently? I have noticed problems along with severl tenants in the community sims that I help to manage.

I haven't had a chance to bug report this yet, but will do so in the morning. I'm working on establishing a solid repro for the issue. The issues seem to center around physical to non-physical and non-phantom to phantom changes when an avatar is stuck (interpenetrating). The avatar begins to float upwards uncontrollably, and does so, even after a teleport, until the avatar sits on an object and then stands up again. I hadn't noticed this behavior prior to about 3 to 4 days ago, and now it's happening fairly often.

Thanks in advance for any information you can provide on any back end physics changes that may be taking place, or if this is a known issue/bug.

Best Regards,
Mike

No, there have not been any significant changes in the physics system. That is a fairly rare bug that has been happening for a very long time. It is usually an indication of non-fatal memory stompage in the axis-aligned-bounding-boxes (AABB's) used in the broad-phase (initial culling phase) of the physics engine. One of the AABB's has been corrupted to report very large size.

Usually the only workaround is to delete and rebuild the affected object, which is why sometimes it can be 'fixed' by having all avatars leave the region and come back, or by deleting a particular object.

We probably have a new memory access bug that we'll have to track down. Most likely it is already causing some fatal memory stompage too. We might already have someone working on this particular bug, since a number of new simulator crash bugs were entered into our bug database recently (thanks to Don Linden).