Frans

Havok 4, for Real?!

by Frans on May.03, 2007, under Virtual Worlds

Upgrading the physics engine has been a long, long wish by Linden Lab and the second life community. It was always pushed back and left us with the old Havok 1.0. Havok 4 could bring us better vehicle physics, springs and other nice features. Most have give up hope that it would ever arrive after many disappointments, but reading Cory’s latest blog post might give us hope once more.

Havok 4 is in testing prior to hitting the Beta grid and the Mono project has fixed the major blockers for us, so we are waiting for resources to free up from other projects there.

I can hardly believe it is for real, but who knows, maybe in a couple of months it will finally arrive.

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View Comments
  • Baba
    >So does this mean we are going to have a physics engine that actually behaves with some semblence of the physical world?


    No! It just means that the physics engine will not have so many of the hangups of Havok 1. Generally those have to do with poor joint support, large prims, sub-optimal collision detection which causes a lot of the physics slowdowns.



    The ammount of physical simulation taking place on the simulators is not likely the increase, so we will probably not see more realistic physical reactions, or that it to say, more expensive reactions. There are sure to be some minor improvements to the algorithems in Havok 4 to allow for some improvements to the physical simulation, but i'm not expecting extensive changes.
  • Paul Decelles
    So does this mean we are going to have a physics engine that actually behaves with some semblence of the physical world?
  • Flipper Peregrine
    Ah, but there's a difference with mono - at least there's a video out there of mono working that was shown at a conference by Babbage...and man, it looked SLICK.
  • Frans Charming
    Haha, yea or mono, or what about capes. ;)
  • Ordinal Malaprop
    All of the jokes involving "we'll get Havok 2/3/4 before that" can, of course, be modified to "we'll get HTML-on-a-prim before that" now.
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