Second Life Beta Testing Havok4

Last Friday Linden Lab set up the Havok4 physics engine for testing on the Second Life Beta Grid. Second Life has been using Havok1 (released in 2000) since its inception and planning for an upgrade to Havok2 for what seems like almost as long. Havok, which was recently acquired by Intel, released version 5.0 earlier this month. "The number one big improvement will be a much more stable simulator," said Andrew Linden in an interview with Second Life Insider. "It will be notably harder to crash a simulator by making very complex objects. Second...there will be performance gains in areas where Havok1 was lagging hard in the physics engine, so not only will crashes be less frequent, but periods of crippling lag will also go down. Third...Once Havok4 is done, we should be able to add many new features with fairly little effort."

According to the official nnouncement, users should expect several other changes:

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

What Should Not Change With Havok4?

• Dynamic objects are still limited to 31 primitives
• Region crossings can still lag and “rubber band”
• Most objects still have a 0.1 meter “collision tolerance” boundary, so they may still collide while appearing to be not quite touching
• Everything else