Scripting & Server News Week 42

For the release candidate on Le Tigre we have some new information that comes from the wiki release notes just recently updated. Some of those are:

Havok Update

The Havok Physics Engine updates to version 2012.1 in the release candidate. In week 35 I reported that this version was coming. At the time we had just updated to 2010.x, I think. This update enables Havok’s terrain optimized that simplifies the physics shape of the terrain for improved performance. This feature can be disabled by region owners and estate managers with the Region Debug Console command “set optimize_terrain false“.

Havok Physics

Some are reporting vehicle crossing are slower.

llGetSimStats

llGetSimStats() has yet to show up in the Linden Scripting Language (LSL)  pages of the wiki. Fortunately the release notes say:

Currently, this function accepts only [[SIM_STAT_PCT_CHARS_STEPPED]] as its parameter, which returns the % of Pathfinding characters skipped each frame, averaged over the last minute.  The returned value corresponds to the “Characters Updated” stat in the viewer’s Statistics Bar.

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Looking Ahead Week 32

Viewer Development

Viewer development process changes a bit. The Lab is changing the release process a touch too. More likely now we will see Third Party Viewer (TPV) Developers releasing betas and development viewers rather than production releases, the later being the stable version intended for general use.

The Lab has gotten much more metric driven about their crash rates. They are putting more effort into holding the lid on the Linden Viewer crash rates. This means code in the Beta and Development viewers are likely to see more testing and changes before new code makes it into the release viewer. That is good thing, but may slow things down.

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