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Massively Speaking Podcast
Massively Speaking Episode 185: Bree-to-play
Latest episode: Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
Reader Comments (1)
Posted: Mar 29th 2008 9:18AM (Unverified) said
Well, after 4 years, nobody expected Havok to ever be upgraded to version 4, and here we are, with almost 600 sims running it on the main grid :)
Moo, I only wonder how Ventrella will excuse himself to Philip (or the next CEO) when Philip clearly stated "no new features in 2008". WindLight is, as Tateru Nino once reported, a bug fix — the old renderer was impossible to continue to maintain, and changing it further to correct annoying bugs was a pain, so the move to a new renderer was needed. The move from Havok 1 to Havok 4 is indeed done because of the same argument. Ditto for Mono vs. the old LSL virtual machine. All these things that sound like "new features" to us are just replacing dated technology, impossible to miantain, by more modern things.
Still, I can't explain why HTML-on-a-prim was introduced (definitely a feature, and one with a HUGE impact), but much less Avatar Puppeteering, which is completely new (no more need of using Poser for anims, yay!). A new UI can also be explained as "making SL more easy to use" (and thus less bugs in the confusing current UI). But what about this project to incorporate facial expressions from your webcam on SL avatars? It's definitely a new feature, not a bug fix.
So mmh. What does that mean? Are they regretting their announcement that "2008 will be only about bug fixes" and going back to their usual routine of splitting their development time with bug fixes, scalability and back-end reliability, and new features?
Mind you, I'm definitely all in favour of avatar puppeteering... with more skeletons if possible... and — who knows? — new avatar meshes (yay!). Ventrella is definitely the person with the know-how to do those — the presentation made in June 2006 was pretty functional, so say the reports, only 3 months after Ventrella joined Linden Lab. Since then he had well over a year to polish his code — so is should be perfect. Let's just hope that Linden Lab is not following too strictly their commitment to "only fix bugs in 2008" and throws in one or two features as well.
Flexisculpties, anyone? :)