Daikon Forge

I know, I know, we’ve all heard it before… Well, it seems more likely now than before, and as evidence I present a post on the Second Life® forums made two days ago by Periapse Linden:

Mono is in final QA for beta

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The latest build of a Mono-enabled simulator is looking good. There are still some bugs, but so far none major enough to prevent a beta. Unless QA finds a showstopper our plan is to begin a Mono beta program next week.

This will be small to start with — four sims on the beta grid will run Mono-enabled. The rest will still be running the Havok™ 4 beta. We’ll make a viewer available which will connect you to the beta grid and will contain the Mono UI (which is really just a “Compile to Mono” checkbox).

Once on the beta grid the Mono team (Babbage, Scouse, and I) will hold office hours there to answer any questions you have on current or future plans. Please see https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mono for more information. That wiki page is for the general resident community, so it contains some basic info about LSL that you may want to skip over. The page will be updated with Mono status throughout the beta.
Cheers,

–Peri

Of course, I’ve been hearing this for 18 months or more. It was, in fact, the promise of running LSL on Mono that got me into Second Life® in the first place: I had run across talk of “Microthreading in Mono”, and a Google Tech Talk video about Second Life from March of 2006 where Prince Philip and Cory Ondrejka where discussing (among other things) how they were changing the VM of LSL to run on Mono with a massive performance improvement.

Being a professional programmer, that one video gave me sufficient interest to check out Second Life® I would never have even considered signing up without the ability to create and script things.

I will be very pleased indeed if they do in fact go ahead with this Mono Beta test, and am very anxious to see what happens to the C:SI combat code under that runtime. It’s way way too optimistic to believe that there won’t be any problems, so I’ll admit that a large part of my motivation is to provide feedback to LL about what’s broken as well as do damage control for C:SI

UPDATE: In the comments Colin provided a link to a Jira issue relevant to C:SI issues Jira #SVC-1274 : Can’t move as freely in the air, and here’s one specifically related to push and kicks: JIRA #SVC-875 Drop off in force applied by llPushObject.

OFF TOPIC: Speaking of damage control, I heard the most bizarre comment today, and I’m still very suprised by it. I was at Samurai Island, and we were discussing how the C:SI kicks don’t have hardly any push under the Havok™ 4 beta, and two of the people there made the comment that if we don’t provide a workaround for that issue, it would be the end of C:SI. Huh? Seriously? A whole combat system – the best Second Life® has to offer – down the tubes just because LL breaks the kick?

We’ll provide a workaround when we can figure out just how the hell we are supposed to support both Havok1 and Havok™ 4 servers without any way provided to tell the difference, I guess. We’ll provide a workaround as soon as we are able to figure one out, no question about it. But I am still amazed by that comment.