Yup, the rumor is true, Havok 4 is to be deployed grid-wide on Monday and Tuesday.

It does not appear that any of the bugs affecting C:SI will be fixed by then, and Linden Lab knows that they are releasing a physics server with many significant changes :

Sidewinder Linden Says:
March 29th, 2008 at 12:33 PM

Please remember - we are here and will be here - we know that you will find some things that behave differently with this version. We will be fixing critical issues as they are raised, and issuing updates as necessary in the short term. Thanks for all of your support! /Sidewinder

Apparently the consideration of whether Havok 4 is more stable than the current simulator code is more important than whether it will break existing content :

As part of our continued effort to increase the stability and reliability of Second Life, we are happy to announce a new simulator that significantly reduces region crashes. This release is the result of the Havok™4 project, a project that updated the physics engine used to determine all movement of objects in Second Life.

….

The Linden Lab Havok4 team will continue to review open issues and work on critical bugs after the release. We know that you will find things that still need attention, and we fully expect that we will continue to do fixes and updates in the period following the release.

With all of the down-time, the almost daily problems with transactions for the last couple of weeks, and everything that has been going horribly wrong lately, I might actually agree with them on that.  I’m not terribly thrilled at being a content creator that will have to field questions and provide support for now-broken products, but this may provide some much-needed stability for everyone in general.

In any case, I am certainly very glad that I’m not the one in charge of making this decision. 

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