Your2ndPlace

As I posted about before, I was playing on the Beta Grid a little bit over the weekend. I downloaded the beta client, started it up and started logging in.

Then it cleared my cache. I liked my cache. It was full of textures I didn't want to have to load all the time. Irked because of that, I soldiered on hoping that it wasn't clearing my main SL cache - which it apparently did. Grumble. The price we pay for reckless experimentation..

So, having logged in, I immediately decided to rez some prims and play with them a bit in Physical mode. Strangely enough, they dropped right through other prims that they were resting on the second that they turned physical - so I raised them above the ground in the area by a good meter, then made them physical. They dropped and did not pass through the prims below - no problem. This seemed like a bit of a glitch, so I did a shift-copy and placed one prim on the other - resting.

The results were a little odd.

There was a large (read: noticeable) space between the two physical prims when resting on each other. Clearly, physical structures that follow the Havok4 engine won't be visually pleasing (perhaps this could be solved by making each object appear slightly larger?)

Then, having read the release notes and the wiki page on Havok4 Beta, I tried out my Colonial Viper - my favorite vehicle. It worked just fine except for steering - its a mouselook fighter and is steered by moving the mouse. Maybe the script uses llSetForce? Could be, but I decided to try a few other things. Having cruised to the end of the grid with the viper, I exited and... landed where there was another vehicle for sale, a hovercraft, but the lag was so horrid that molasses would be envious. I could barely move, scripts weren't reactive - and there were only about 8 people on the grid. Still, I bought the hovercraft and it, too, didn't react.

This is going to upset a few people.

I logged out, having learned a few things - but I think the most important thing I learned was that there was no noticeable decrease in lag using the Havok4 engine (if they hadn't trashed my cache, I would have been able to judge better!). In fact, my last experience on the grid showed a lot worse lag - but I can be forgiving because it is a beta.

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