Smile. You knew this was coming…

As a public service, I’m reposting Owen Oyen’s recent announcement about Havok 4 implementation on the main grid:

Folks,
It appears the finish line has arrived.
LL is taking Havok 4 live this coming week — probably to hit an end of fiscal quarter deadline.
I perhaps should not have even said that because the work they have done has been good and they may be essentially ready.
SL sailing is likely going to see the following:

1) No violent collision reactions.
2) Boat absolute speed performance not hugely different for the same conditions as what has been seen in the past.
3) Boat performance with varying numbers of avatars aboard . . . again not hugely different for the same conditions as what has been seen in the past.
4) Steering of boats will likely look very close to what has been seen in the past and what people are accustomed to.
5) Some, and maybe many, boats are going to be lower in the water than what we are used to seeing. This may require boat builder intervention with upgrades. I did all I could on this urging the LL H4 guys to address it, and they tried very hard. It looks like a simple problem and it is not. I recommend that if/when complaints start about this that boat builders do NOT leap forward to do an upgrade — because I suspect if there are many complaints LL will do at least one more effort to fix this at the server level. There will likely be some boats with no problem. There will be others that have it. The good news is that if no server fix is forthcoming, the problem is fixable by builders.
6) Boats with wave motion are going to look different than they do presently. This situation was much worse just a week ago than it is now. They made a strong effort to address this problem too, and they made progress, but the appearance is still clearly different from what we are used to on the Main Grid. I do think this will also be an area where builders can get appearance back to what they are used to. As recently as a week ago this was not true.

My understanding is porting of H4 to all main grid regions starts Monday. You WILL notice changes, but most are not severe — or at least all that have been noted are not severe. Hope for the best.

Don’t worry, sportsfans. We’ll get through this with Owen’s help.

And hey… what’s Springtime without a little Havok thrown in?

/JFos