For those of you who do not keep up with the happenings our our dear Linden Lab® (heh or Linden Lab™) I’ll look it up and have another post about that later, has raised Havok or is it Havoc that has arrived to Second Life!

Some of you thought that on April 1 there was a huge April Fools joke when the new Havok 4 servers were rolled out with little warning. I sincerely hope it isn’t.

What is Haovk 4? Havok 4 is a physics simulation technology which simulates how our virtual objects will react when placed under circumstances such as being dropped, rolled, thrown, hit, shot etc. Linden’s started testing this in 2007 and in January of 2008 began the beta testing of in an early adopters program of various voluntary sims. I decided to not put DreamScape on that list.

In saying all of this, Havok 4 is supposed to improve performance and make things run smoother. Less huge sim crashes due to physics issues. This is great! I hope it is true. Time will tell.

An annoyance that Indigo and I noticed immediately is that when you are hovering at any altitude, you are unable to maintain that altitude. If you are just hovering there, you slowly begin to sink, if you push up you begin to slowly rise again to a certain point then start to fall again. I’ve noticed too that mountain slopes seem more slippery when trying to climb and there is less traction. Also our hug attachment seems to be more hilarious than endearing, with one of us running in place the entire embrace. So much for the tenderness factor. We’ve also noticed some scripted items had to be taken back into inventory and re-rezzed to work properly. The wildest thing though I will post about and include photos on my next post!

Havock is supposed to wreck havoc on griefing as we know it. Maybe, for a bit anyway, physical griefing will be less, until they find a work-around. They always do, we can bet on that!

Have you noticed any unusual physical behaviors related to the physics of SL?

I think the thing that has me most perplexed about the Havok roll-out is the newest viewer they presented at the same time. Why? It almost feels like a cover up in case all went to hell during the rollout! lol The viewer is awesome with the windlight integration, however, as I have previously predicted, this will do in the people on the testy and insecure connections and mediocre computers for sure! This will make the average experience of SL terrible without a new computer and excellent graphics card. I feel the viewer is far too complicated menu-wise for the noob or non-computer saavy too.

Let me know what odd behaviors you are seeing on the islands.