Archive for January, 2008 Page 3 of 6

Havok™ 4 has a *long* way to go

Well, after a couple of days of dealing with a Havok™ 4 Early Adopter sim, I’m fairly confidently able to say that the Havok™ 4 program is absolutely not ready for "prime time".

It’s bad enough that the physics are sufficiently different as to cause problems for C:SI combat, but even non-physical things are borked.  For instance, not once in the last two days has an object I attempted to create been created where I indicated, most often being misplaced by several meters.  That might sound like a minor issue, but when you *commonly* spend multiple dozens of hours making sure that prims are as perfectly aligned as SL™ will allow, you know that being off by several meters is much too frustrating to deal with after a bit.  To top that off, not once has an object I’ve attempted to rez by hand from inventory succeeded the first time. 

There have also been hundreds of what appear to be Asset Server-related issues, but when I go to another sim (even a super-laggy one containing a mall) those issues simply don’t occur.  For instance, I cannot conveniently edit scripts in my skybox because at least 50% of the time they simply fail to load - and even after I do get them to load, half the time they fail to save as well - which would normally indicated heavy Asset Server loads yet when I go to ANY OTHER sim it works as expected. 

I’m still excited that Linden Lab® is working on a new physics engine, and they’ve done some very impressive work so far, but as a content creator who spends 90% of his SL™ time building and scripting, both of which are moderately to severely borked in my Havok™ 4 home sim, it’s far too painful an environment to work in.  It looks like I will be temporarily moving my workspace for the forseeable future :(

Popularity: 25% [?]

Mono is deployed on Beta Grid

I’m probably jumping the gun a little bit, but I just discovered a post on SLOG (Mono deployed on the Beta Grid) by Gwyneth Llewelyn that says the anxiously awaited day is here:

At the Linden Lab® Q&A today, following Joe ‘Linden’ Miller’s podcast, Joe just announced that Mono had been deployed on the Beta Grid. It’s now running on some of the sims there.

Congratulations to Babbage Linden and his team for rolling out Mono on the Beta Grid.

An official announcement will be coming shortly… in the mean time, download the SL™ Beta Viewer, hit the Beta Grid, and break the scripts there :)

/me runs off to download the beta viewer….

Popularity: 19% [?]

Colin Sez : "I’m 1 years old"

hehe…  I am imagining an infant, you know how they talk when they tell you how old they are…  Okay, well, it’s funny to me.  Guess you had to be there.

In any case, it’s Colin’s 1-year rezday in Second Life:

Well, today is my first Rezday. I was thinking of inviting people to my house for a party or something, but my computer hasn’t been fully functional this past week so I wasn’t on SL™ to send out notices and things. I may still log in tonight and see if I can get something impromptu going.

HAPPY REZDAY COLIN!!!

Popularity: 19% [?]

[UPDATED] Mono is in final QA for Beta

I know, I know, we’ve all heard it before… Well, it seems more likely now than before, and as evidence I present a post on the Second Life® forums made two days ago by Periapse Linden:

Mono is in final QA for beta


The latest build of a Mono-enabled simulator is looking good. There are still some bugs, but so far none major enough to prevent a beta. Unless QA finds a showstopper our plan is to begin a Mono beta program next week.

This will be small to start with — four sims on the beta grid will run Mono-enabled. The rest will still be running the Havok™ 4 beta. We’ll make a viewer available which will connect you to the beta grid and will contain the Mono UI (which is really just a “Compile to Mono” checkbox).

Once on the beta grid the Mono team (Babbage, Scouse, and I) will hold office hours there to answer any questions you have on current or future plans. Please see https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mono for more information. That wiki page is for the general resident community, so it contains some basic info about LSL that you may want to skip over. The page will be updated with Mono status throughout the beta.
Cheers,

–Peri

Of course, I’ve been hearing this for 18 months or more. It was, in fact, the promise of running LSL on Mono that got me into Second Life® in the first place: I had run across talk of “Microthreading in Mono”, and a Google Tech Talk video about Second Life from March of 2006 where Prince Philip and Cory Ondrejka where discussing (among other things) how they were changing the VM of LSL to run on Mono with a massive performance improvement.

Being a professional programmer, that one video gave me sufficient interest to check out Second Life® I would never have even considered signing up without the ability to create and script things.

I will be very pleased indeed if they do in fact go ahead with this Mono Beta test, and am very anxious to see what happens to the C:SI combat code under that runtime. It’s way way too optimistic to believe that there won’t be any problems, so I’ll admit that a large part of my motivation is to provide feedback to LL about what’s broken as well as do damage control for C:SI :)

UPDATE: In the comments Colin provided a link to a Jira issue relevant to C:SI issues Jira #SVC-1274 : Can’t move as freely in the air, and here’s one specifically related to push and kicks: JIRA #SVC-875 Drop off in force applied by llPushObject.

OFF TOPIC: Speaking of damage control, I heard the most bizarre comment today, and I’m still very suprised by it. I was at Samurai Island, and we were discussing how the C:SI kicks don’t have hardly any push under the Havok™ 4 beta, and two of the people there made the comment that if we don’t provide a workaround for that issue, it would be the end of C:SI. Huh? Seriously? A whole combat system - the best Second Life® has to offer - down the tubes just because LL breaks the kick?

We’ll provide a workaround when we can figure out just how the hell we are supposed to support both Havok1 and Havok™ 4 servers without any way provided to tell the difference, I guess. We’ll provide a workaround as soon as we are able to figure one out, no question about it. But I am still amazed by that comment.

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