When I was a very young avatar in mid-2006, and just made my first steps in that world of ours, one of the things I learned from the elder guys were the jokes about the physics engine, and it’s upgrade in the “near” future. “kk, I give you full permissions on that object as soon as they finish Havok2. Hahaha.” Havok2 would never come, I learned. Who cared? Lindenlab surely were busy with other stuff, I understood. And why should there be another physics engine? Everything was working perfectly, sortof. I grew older and learned a lot, in that vast rush of personal development and learning, you can expericence only so often in your life, having the opportunity to jump into a totally new world. I decided to be a professional developer, Primforge was founded, we built some awesome sims.

One night when we were building a labyrinth for Gamesload Island, Dread crashed the sim. There was this tunnel, the players should jump down from a pebble, run through a field of moving prims, not touching anything, while dangerous objects were falling down from the ceiling.

Dangerous indeed! The rezzer producing these spiky, nasty, physical objects had a built in time constant, that was set just a bit too small. Whenever it rezzed some of these spiky balls, and they were touching each other while falling, slowing down, blocking the way for the other nastities to come out, after a few seconds the sim slowed down and crashed. Game Over…

We had a hard time to stop that process, since everytime the island would boot up, the nasty-rezzer sitting at its old place, happily starting to do what it was invented for. Or at least what was implemented. Eventually we managed to delete the object, without being deleted by it. And then we crashed the sim once more, on purpose, just for the lulz^^.

That physics engine wasn’t so perfect after all, I learned. If we could crash a sim that easy, maybe griefers could do so too? Or even take down 17 sims in a swastika pattern? Nasty, nasty bug. Well, the solution was simple, Linden Lab just had to prohibit the use and possession of icky, spiky objects!!1! Thanx Philip, nothing like that ever happened… ^^

And that other thing, Mono! Actually, Mono never made it into buzzword heaven, but, hey, 100 times the performance of a good old LSL script. “LOL, sure, You can have my brand new SexGen Platinum, but not right now. Lets wait until they implement the Mono backend. Hahaha!^^”

Well, that’s long ago. We had a lot of fun since then (and loads of stress, crashed sims [I didn't do it!!], miserable script performance, general lag, etc.), while SL grew up to 20 times its size, slowly, then very fast, and now back to slow again. Why should there be any change? Everything works perfectly, sortof (*gg*).

Surprise, Lindenlab don’t think like that. They have been planning the Havok update and the Mono Engine for more than 2 years, and it’s knocking on our (scripted) doors right now. Mono is running on the Beta grid, in that same moment, that I’m writing this lines. Havok4 is on some sims on the mainland already. We will see a much more stable grid soon, and one with a vastly improved performance.

4 times the memory space, and 100 times the performance for each new script. Less processor time for scripts, that means more time available for inter process communication, networking, database transfer. That means: More complex, better usable, and richer applications in Second Life.

We just have to invent them, implement them, use them.
It’s happening now.

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