Havok 2?

My understanding(which could be wrong) is that Havok 2 is the same engine that Halflife 2 was designed on.

If that's the case, will the graphics and physics be as good as in Halflife 2?

they are only as good as the SL users make it

Havok 2 is physics, not the graphics. Half Life 2 was designed on the Valve engine, which uses Havok 2 for the physics.

If we had Havok 2, the physics would work better.

Umm dunno, I never tried to play pool in the middle of a disco in HalfLife 2

"Source" engine. Valve is the developer, so it's the "Valve Source" engine.

Oops, I thought I typed that wrong. My mistake, it is Source engine. Don't know what I was thinking when I said Valve. I am normally the one who has to correct people on that, and here I do it myself.

Havok Fx does the graphics portion I believe and not the physics, I think I read about a graphics update on the LL forum section just the other day though no specific mention to Havok.

No I'm fairly sure Havok is physics, LL recently updated the rendering system to a different OpenGL standard (the actual open source one rather than NVidia's variation). However, I think it's still disabled atm due to some lingering incompatibilities. It won't make a massive difference, I dunno which is faster, but it ought to make it easer to develop in and maybe upgrade the OpenGL version being used.

Havok is physics and is purely to do with where objects are, it should improve things like collision detection and be generally more efficient at doing things. I'm hoping they go for using it for speed enhancements primarily, while it may offer some nice new features, I think SL's physics do everything they really need to do atm. I want more speed over ragdoll physics or whatever =)

Half-Life 2 runs on the Source engine which was create by VALVe which uses heavily altered Havok 1 code for physics handling.

So Half-Life 2 is in no way associated with Havok 2.

This is not true. Every single news source and wiki that I could find doing a google search pointed to the fact that Half-Life 2 does indeed use the Havok 2 engine for it's physics. Half-Life 1 was based on a heavily modified version of the Quake 2 engine... perhaps you were thinking about and became confused?

Second time I've heard that here. Just to clear up some misinformation..
Half-Life 1 uses a modified Quake1 engine, with some very small snippets from the Quake2 engine tossed in.
http://collective.valve-erc.com/index.php?go=q1_or_q2
< /tangent >

At any rate, the Source engine is BSP based, and would not at all be suitable for Second Life's open enviroment nor its dynamic geometry.

Geometry calculations, visibility(culling) calculations, lighting calculations, et cetra, are all handled in the BSP compile process required for the Source engine, which can take up to several hours depending on the map. Although its damned fast in-game(because the heavy calculations are done in the long compile process) it's not suitable for SL.

Havok FX exploits graphics card's Shader Model 3.0 processing capabilites, using it for physics caculations instead of shaders, apparently. It has nothing to do with actual rendering.

For the Source engine, Valve made a new BSP based rendering engine themselves, and licensed whaver version of Havok. Supposedly they then heavily modified the Havok engine. After that, they linked their render engine and their modified Havok physics engine together and deemed it the "Source Engine". Heck, they don't even mention Havok on their engine features page, so the confusion isn't unwarranted...

Half-Life 2's renderer and physics engine are two seprate entities.

For gods sakes. I just want normal Havok2 so stuff wouldn't act so screwy!

Well there's no saying that things won't act just as screwy (like walking up completely vertical surfaces just by walking into them. ^.^; ) but at least most of the glitches would disappear (like hinges popping apart when a sufficient force is applied to them, or just falling off altogether). I'd really like some interpolation so you can't physics your way through objects just by going fast enough as I've done on several occasions.

HavokFX offloads the physics calculations to the GPU, not graphics. The point of doing that is majority of game developers don't fully utilize the GPU's capablities nor fully utilize SLI setups so they're gonna use the unused GPU cycles to calculate physics. This is Havok's answer to Agea's Physics Accelerator card (wich is incompatable with Havok). Right now HavokFX will only work on series 6 & 7 (6x00 & 7x00) nVidia cards and really woulnd't be usefull for SL because all physics calculations are done server side.

Check the Havok website, the are quite good at promoting the games that use their engine and the variants of the physics, fx, etc...versions.

Ron I was just quoting their tech support from their website about the status of SL. I'd post the mail, but then that would be a breach of DCMA

Contact them if you have questions. I did.

That was the first site I checked. Unfortunately, while it DOES list Second Life, it does not list the version of havok that any of the programs use.

HavokFX

HavokFX's website. HavokFX is strictly physics acceleration wich gives programmers more flexiblity with graphical content such as water, fog/smoke, debris, ragdoll effects, etc etc. HavokFX won't help SL unless LL is willing to go out and buy good graphics accelerator cards for each sim (wich means SLI or even the new Quad-SLI is needed).