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Lord of the Rings Online developer Turbine has just announced their official licensing of Havok Physics, Havok Animation and Havok Behavior 6 for their yet-unnamed MMO project. As you may remember, Turbine stated intent for creating their next MMO on PC and consoles, which would fall in line with this Havok engine which includes support for multiple platforms including the Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii.

The Havok 6.0 suite is a collection of development tools made specifically for programmers and artists to build "interactive character performances" that are said to respond to their physical environment in the game. With this advanced set of tools and the recent venture capital in hand, Turbine may indeed be on their way to making the first truly cross-platform MMO.

Two years ago, Sony dropped 250,000 colorful, bouncy balls down a street in San Francisco to show the clarity of their Bravia televisions. Last month, Second Life resident Dorky Mohr decided to recreate that commercial as a machinima. While it pokes fun at the physical balls not crashing the sim due to the Havok 4 upgrade, this blogger still saw the beauty of the original commercial in this one.

[Thanks, Dorky!]

If you have machinima or movie suggestions from any MMO, please send them to machinima AT massively DOT com, along with any information you might have about them.

This week the main Second Life grid finally upgraded to Havok 4. Watching another user puzzling over a physics-based piece of gimcrackery that wasn't working properly, we decided to take a look at the way Havok 4 is processing collisions in a practical way. By making lots of physics things, and -- you know -- shoving them about to see what happened.

After about 30 minutes of experimentation it became clear that collision volumes for prims are being calculated very oddly indeed.

Only in our case it is not "havoc" but "Havok" and most people don't wander Second Life's islands in in squirrel avatars. Apparently this weekend's RC3 update went well and Havok will be hitting the grid today -- albeit a bit late in the day. From the official blog we have the report that the server previously known as the Havok 4 Beta Server (now Second Life Simulator v1.20.0.83683), after some bug fixes this morning, has started rolling out to the live grid. Tonight it will only be implemented for early adopters, welcome areas, orientation islands, and 1200 randomly selected Second Life regions -- but by tomorrow Havok will hit the rest of the grid.

Though no one around the Massively office actually remembers how long it has been since Second Life's residents were promised an upgrade from the Havok 1 engine the simulator has been using since pre-beta, but we're fairly certain it was at least 2003. To celebrate this momentous occasion, we're breaking out the champaign and party hats: Havok 4 has arrived!

According to Sidewinder Linden, program manager for the Havok 4 project at Linden Lab, Havok 4 will be rolled out across the whole Second Life grid starting Monday, 31 March (depending on the overall performance of the RC3 update over the weekend). Looks like we win the betting pool, and that means candy!

More than half of simulator crashes and restarts are tied back to physics problems. That being the case, it seems that this new code will be the most stable Second Life simulator ever. According to the timetable, assuming the current release candidate is not found wanting on Monday morning, it will be rolled out to an initial group of up to 2,000 simulators, followed by a deployment to all the rest on Tuesday, 1 April.

We believe you'll also see Windlight (1.19.1) roll out as the official viewer on Monday, or perhaps Tuesday. It's going to be a hell of a start to the new quarter.

Sharp-eyed reader Jayden Beresford noticed that Monday's announcement about the reattempted 1.19.2 Second Life software update included a note that 1.19.3 would roll out next week, including the new Havok-4 code.

The text was, apparently, very quickly withdrawn, but we think that it is very plausible that the Havok-4 code will roll out either next week or the week after. It's presently into release-candidates, and the reports we have on how it functions are all very positive. Assuming 1.19.2 goes well this week, it seems likely that Havok-4 will hit the grid within the next 14 days.

Last week's deployment of 1.19.2 onto the Second Life grid did not go at all well, and affected simulators had to be rolled back to the earlier 1.19.1 version. Linden Lab's Bridie Linden tells us that the issue with the new server software (exactly what was wrong was never mentioned) has been identified and fixed, and a new three-phase update will be taking place this week, starting tomorrow evening.

The first batch of 500 simulators will be updated Tuesday evening from 8PM. 1,500 more simulators will be updated from 7PM Wednesday evening, assuming all goes well with the first 500. Finally at 6PM Thursday evening (again, assuming that we have no further issues resembling last week's problems) the all of the remaining simulators will be updated to 1.19.2 (with the exception of the simulators in the Havok Early Adopters Program).

There is another multipart update on the way for Second Life this week to version 1.19.2 (we certainly hope it addresses some of the problems that have taken place today. It has been a rough one). While the multipart updates probably total more actual time than the earlier kinds, we like them better because they afford more opportunity to back out of major problems that are discovered along the way.

This update supports PRIM_GLOW in scripts (but the viewer doesn't, so you won't be able to use it right away, necessarily). Some internal changes to do with reducing database load (hey, there's an awful lot of that going on, we've noticed) that won't be initially enabled, more internal logging and diagnostics (we suppose the servers will be logging everything in more detail), and fix for a bug where an IM might somehow wind up sent to the wrong person.

Sidewinder Linden reports that Havok 4 early adopter simulators (all 435 of them) have been updated with a fresh code drop, fixing a tidy bundle of issues.

When it comes to bug-fixes per week, this has to be some kind of record for Linden Lab at the moment. We've never seen them put out so many fixes in such a short period of time as they have in the last couple of months.

Coobico is a Flash-based MMO with social networking features that's purported to be set for release sometime early this year. Following a link embedded in this Gamasutra interview with Lutz Winter, Coobico's founder, I found the 'Videos and Animations' section of Coobico's website. At the top of the page was a small post whose sole purpose appeared to be to stomp all over Second Life. It talks about SL's technical problems without going into specifics, links to a bunch of articles detailing SL's woes, and ends by mentioning that the company that made SL's physics engine, Havok (which it misspells), will be acquired by Intel, but to no point other than to mention it.

For a product that isn't even available in beta yet, this is some serious dirt slinging. I'm not defending SL here, but why bother shooting off your mouth about a company that you claim to have no competition with? There's really no better way to look defensive and insecure, so if that was the intent behind this weird article, then Mission Accomplished.

Owners of private estates in Second Life can opt to run preview versions of the Havok 4 physics engine on any of their simulators. Bear in mind that this is a beta and things won't work right - at least not right away.

Exactly what things won't work right? Well the whole point of this is to find out - or in other words, if there was a good answer to that question then there wouldn't be any need for the early-adopter program.

Sidewinder Linden reports that the Second Life beta grid (Aditi) has been updated with a new version of the Havok 4.6 adapter code, ready for a weekend beta test.

There are a quite a number of good fixes in this refresh. Havok4 is starting to feel more like a physics system should, despite the engine not being ideally suited for tasks like it is being asked to perform.

It's been no less a tumultuous year for Second Life in 2007 this year than any previous year, frankly. There are a few standout items though.

This isn't the list that anyone else might make - We might completely skip over one of the things you see as standing out as a huge impact, based solely on that we don't actually think it was that big a deal in the scheme of things.

Megaprims in Second Life are prims (primitive geometric shapes that everything is made out of) that are larger than the standard size. These mightily oversized components were originally created through an exploit and are used in many places in Second Life, for construction, decoration and causing grief or inconvenience to others.

"Megaprims are a mis-feature... a bug that many people consider a feature." -- Andrew Linden.

During a talk at the Volunteer Island Meeting Area today, Andrew Linden mentioned megaprims during a discussion about the new Havok 4 implementation.

Sidewinder Linden reports that the Second Life beta grid (Aditi) has been updated with a new version of the Havok 4.6 adapter code, ready for a weekend beta test.

We're also told that Linden Lab have been using this code on their company-use simulators (which probably means that it's running on a selected few main grid sims that we normally can't see or access). We wonder if Linden Lab works simulator physics as hard as the day-to-day usage that it gets from users.