With Havok 4 now live in beta on the beta-grid (actually it's Havok 4.6), Andrew Linden scheduled a session yesterday to talk about the deployment and testing process for the new physics engine.

Unfortunately, due to unforeseen family commitments, Andrew could not be there, but Program Manager Sidewinder Linden took his place. Thanks to Pavig Lok for providing us with a transcript of the session, we've summarized the key items for you below the fold.

"As you probably are well aware this is a project that's been in motion for a long time, with a variety of issues holding it back, so part of this was figuring out how to clear the roadblocks, help people focus and figure out which features should be taken off the map to get here."

Sidewinder Linden outlined the basic goals for the current Havok 4 beta. "First is to see how many crash modes are left in the current build. We have tried 'a number of interesting toys' and haven't seen much that can crash the current sim, which is hopefully good news. frankly, i'd like to know if there are any 'kill modes' left for these sims ... With that said, please do NOT go trouncing through the beta world and kill off all the sims if you find one, ok? that's not too nice to everyone else :)"

"Second is to try to make sure that we don't break existing content. As much as possible, we'd like for things that used to work on havok1 to continue to work with havok4. I know, and we know, that you will find things that don't work the same in havok4, whether in products or behavior - if you find products and scripts that don't seem to work right, or the same, please post a JIRA [issue] with the specifics so that we can take a look at it, ok?"

How soon can we expect Havok 4?

"Rollout is as soon as possible," says Sidewinder, "but how [soon] that will happen depends on this beta, and how many bugs there are to clear. I'm sure we will have some real work to do as a result of the beta, so we won't be going to the main grid right away. We will likely do another beta round (or more although i hope to have it go two cycles)."

The actual rollout on the main grid will most likely be staged, Sidewinder said. "We will be using hetgrid to start with havok4 on a very few regions in a "corner" of the world, and then expand from there as it looks like we're ready."

On testing, "The trick to 'testing physics' in an environment like second life is that there are also a lot of interactions between av's and objects, so the full test model is a many sided beast ... one thing i've been working on is expanding our testing models to work through these issues."

"This is not expected to be a super fast cycle beta because it is a highly complex replacement for everybody. There are lots of reasons to push this quickly and lots not to. The more [information] we have reported in terms of items that don't work, the more we can look at fixing."

Sidewinder is maintaining a Wiki page on the Havok beta here.