It has been alleviated through the introduction of an overlap ejection capability. The previous Havok 1 installment of the physics engine caused what is known as the Deep Think condition processing overlapping object collisions endlessly. However, more than 500 constantly interacting collisions have noticeable impact on simulator performance. This new engine is capable of simulating thousands of physical objects at once. Īs of April 1, 2008, Second Life simulators use the Havok 4 physics engine for all in-game dynamics. Additionally, each player's avatar is treated as a physical object so that it may interact with physical objects in the world. Complex shapes may be linked together in groups of up to 255 separate primitives. Objects can be nonphysical and nonmoving, or actively physical and movable. The servers' log files actually record events in UTC, however.Įach server instance runs a physics simulation to manage the collisions and interactions of all objects in that region. Hence it runs 7 hours behind UTC most of the year, and 8 hours behind when Standard Time is in effect during the winter. The virtual world follows the North American Daylight Saving Time convention. The Second Life world runs on Linden Time, which is identical to the Pacific Time Zone. Modern servers with two dual-core processors usually support four separate server instances.

Multiple server instances can be run on a single physical server, but generally each instance is given a dedicated CPU core of its own. Each Region is simulated by a single named server instance, and is given a unique name and content rating (PG, Mature or Adult). The world is divided into 256x256 m areas of land, called Regions.

The flat, Earth-like world of Second Life is simulated on a large array of Debian servers, referred to as the Grid.

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