ok there's an interpretation of what philip said in the last townhall, that reads "havok is not a priority" thread is here
so... is havok 2/3 a priority? if so, eta? this year? next year?
if not, could you say why not?
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StoneSelf Karuna
His Grace
Join date: 13 Jun 2004
Posts: 1,955
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03-18-2006 11:46
ok there's an interpretation of what philip said in the last townhall, that reads "havok is not a priority" thread is here
so... is havok 2/3 a priority? if so, eta? this year? next year? if not, could you say why not? |
Torley Linden
Enlightenment!
![]() Join date: 15 Sep 2004
Posts: 16,530
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03-18-2006 17:19
A Havok upgrade isn't currently a priority relative to other projects being worked on. Why not is because of what Philip explained in the Town Hall transcript:
Philip Linden: On the new physics engine... Philip Linden: Havok 2 and 3 have the same interface, which is different from Havok 1. Philip Linden: Meaning that we'll be able to easily go from 2 to 3. Philip Linden: It is important to understand why with limited resources. Philip Linden: we are not working right now at top priority on the havok upgrade... Philip Linden: right now crashes due to havok 1 are infrequent relative to other sim crashes. Philip Linden: Our big goal with upgrading the physics core is to eliminate crashes to sims due to havok Philip Linden: There won't be many visible benefits at first beyond that. Philip Linden: Which is why we are less focused on it. Philip Linden: We will need to do more work for better vehicles and joints and the like. Philip Linden: Havok 2 may still make it soon, Philip Linden: I just wanted to explain priorities... we have bigger crashes and frame rate improvements that are ahead of it. Emphasis mine. After more of the dust clears with 1.9 and subsequent releases emerge, as there has been in the past, there'll be more to go on. Additionally, here's a recent post by Andrew Linden with more details: The Havok2 port was in progress (for the third time) several months ago and is currently stalled again. The problem is that the amount of work required to clean up the code and port the new physics engine is too big for the attention span of LL development process. Rather than tackle it as a monolithic project a fourth time we have to break up the cleanup work into smaller pieces that will go out with the normal updates. A small amount of this cleanup has already been deployed, however the first big chunk (a lot of work salvaged from the third port) hasn't been done yet -- I hope to get to that this month. There are probably two or three more initial cleanup stages that won't introduce any new features at all. When we actually get around to making the port we'll most likely be working with Havok3 since Havok Inc is no longer 'supporting' Havok2. That's okay, since there is very little difference between Havok3 and Havok2, whereas there is a big difference between Havok1 and Havok2. The only thing relevant to us that was added in Havok3 is a feature called 'continuous collision detection' which allows for more correct collision details and prevents accidental interpenerations during the integration step of the physics engine. Unfortunately, it costs extra CPU cycles, and it isn't clear to us that we'll be using it (it can easily be disabled to fall back on Havok2 behavior). Incidentally, we're thinking we might stop supporting 'joints' in Havok1 before we move to Havok3. Joints are buggy but very difficult to fix while supporting the legacy format, which is why we haven't fixed them yet. Joints are in desperate need of a complete redesign, and would be much easeir to re-implement after Havok3 rather than trying to provide legacy support during the port. Eliminating joints would remove a big chunk of the work required for the final transition from Havok1 to Havok3, making the whole project easier to break up into achievable pieces. Source _____________________
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