I was reading Shawn Hargreaves blog looking for some tidbits for a current project when I came across his post on using hysteresis in games, and I could have just about kicked myself!
Suddenly, some of the odd behavior I’ve seen from my C:SI combat bots made perfect sense…. They will sometimes appear to lock up and go spastic, and it’s now apparent to me that they were rapidly fluctuating between two conflicting states.
It’s so obvious now that someone has pointed it out to me in coding terms 
*headdesk*
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Linden Labs is implementing a supposedly more secure authentication scheme for Second Life® (as mentioned on the Second Life® wiki). While several other people (Nicholaz, Dalien, among others) are writing astute posts about what this means and whether or not it will work as intended, I wanted to preserve the following snapshots for posterity
Doesn’t leave one with complete confidence, does it?
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This is sure to be one of the most talked-about topics amongst Second Life developers in the next few days: It seems a secret Linden Lab project has come to fruition with testing of Havok 4 on the Beta Grid.
From the Official Second Life blog:
It is time to announce the beta testing of “the project you thought would never ever get finished” - one that has been far more complex than we expected. Of course, I’m talking about the long-awaited upgrade of the Second Life physics engine to Havok2… which is now Havok4! The Havok physics engine provides the core algorithms for collisions and rigid body dynamics - anything that pushes, collides or tumbles in-world.
WHAT WILL HAVOK4 DO FOR SECOND LIFE?
This project is all about improving sim stability and reliability, reducing lag in the physics engine, and fixing some bugs that could not be fixed under Havok1. In other words, there are no new features in the Havok4 project, despite the fact that there has been significant work done “under the hood”. Once Havok4 is stable (out of beta testing and on the main grid) we will be able to start adding new features, but the current goal is to get all the current features working with this new version of Havok.
The Havok4 public preview is now open, and you can help us finish testing by downloading the beta installers, logging into the beta, testing the objects in your inventory, and reporting any problems you encounter.
What Should Change With Havok4?
- Reduced simulator crashes
- Less lag in the physics engine
- More reliable prim linkage
- Stacked dynamic objects react when supporting objects are removed
- Improved collision management - uniform spheres collide as spheres, rather than as faceted shapes
- Penetrating dynamic objects will be automatically pushed apart by Havok4’s collision solver
- Vertical simulation extent has been increased to 1024 meters
- Some slight dynamic changes - avatar movements have changed slightly
I’m not ready yet to fall all over myself with excitement, we’ve seen other things in preview and on the Beta Grid that still haven’t "gone main" yet, but it’s very interesting news nevertheless.
I can’t wait (till I can get back in-world) to see what this does to swords and other weapons… I hope it’s all of the good and none of the bad.
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For those of you not following along with Katherine Berry’s AjaxLife project, it’s basically a web-based Second Life viewer that allows you to log in, send instant messages, chat, teleport, and a few other limited things. It was one of the cooler RL <-> SL projects (along with PHPSimCaps) I’ve seen thus far, and Katherine is to be commended for making it.
Unfortunately, it seems that LL killed AjaxLife by closing down or breaking the MapAPI part of their site that allowed third-party developers to display maps of Second Life areas on their own websites. This was a tremendously useful bit of functionality for several projects, some of my own unreleased projects included, but was perhaps displayed to best effect by AjaxLife.
It is incredibly frustrating that Linden Labs so regularly and spectacularly breaks or removes functionality that affects third-party developers - both in-world and out. Without content creators and developers Second Life would be nothing more than a poorly rendered 3D chat room, so it would seem logical to me that they’d have a bit more care and better testing procedures in place.
Alas, as disappointing as this is, it’s par for the course.
Sorry to hear about all your hard work broken by LL’s inability to communicate or even to imagine the simplest consequences of their actions, Katherine 
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