Firestorm Viewer Update!

Firestorm 4.6.1 is available for download! I have been using the 64bit version for over a week with no problems.

There is a warning about the download: “New untested download server! Results may vary! We are using a new server for our downloads and we do not know how well it will perform. Please be patient if your download is slow and know that we are monitoring things.” I strongly recommend checking the sumcheck to be sure it did not get corrupted in the download process. Also be patient and perhaps download in a few days and/or in the wee hours of the morning.

As always, do a clean install!

 

“I love it when a plan comes together!” Hannibal; The A-Team

Are your friends looking sick? Get in the Sunshine!

SSB (Server-side Baking (or Appearance)rolls to the entire grid

today (Tuesday). If you are not using a properly equipped viewer avatars will not be seen properly. Jessica Lyon has a good post at the Firestorm Blog which applies to all viewers. There has been a long run-up to this new feature. No one can say they were not warned! LL and many private blogs have been talking about this for many months! This is a major improvement to the avatar rez process, a major improvement!

I am sure there will be wackadoodles who will be crying “the sky is falling” and the end of Second Life. Ignore them.

Those accessing SL with very old equipment will have the most problems, some will find they can not access the grid at all. My best advice to them is to try various Third Party Viewers in the hopes of finding one that works. Text viewers will of course get you on line but with limited or no graphics. You knew that sooner or later all computers become obsolete.

Bugs will appear in one part of a working program when another ‘unrelated’ part is modified.   Murphyism

As Inara points out, and Jessica makes clear, there are rules. If you can’t abide by them please wait a few days for the official release!

Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld

The Firestorm team have announced the re-opening of their Second Life release preview group, for those who are interested in assisting the team with identifying potential issues / bugs with new releases of the Firestorm viewer.

The announcement, entitled “Feeling Brave?” from Jessica Lyon, reads in part:

“The perfect understanding of an event after it has happened, often when you realize too late what you could have done to avoid it.” We had one of those moments shortly after our last Firestorm release when we discovered that quite a few users were experiencing a bug that made their screens pink. This bug had slipped past our Quality Assurance team and went out in the official release. The hindsight is that we could have offered a pre-release to a larger number of users than what we have in our beta group. Chances are they would have discovered the bug, we would…

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Important meeting Wednesday

This is something new and profound, there will be a meeting / discussion / interview with Jessica Lyon and Oz Linden at Wednesday, March 7th at 3pm SLT. The meeting will be broadcast live over Treet.tv and questions will be accepted from the audience! To my knowledge nothing like this has happened before. Hopefully it is the first of many such attempts at interactive communication between the community and Linden Lab.

The full announcement from the Phoenix Viewer blog is copied below:

LL&TPV’s – The Interview

Mon, 05 Mar 2012

This Wednesday, March 7th at 3pm SLT. I, Jessica Lyon will be interviewing Oz Linden from Linden Lab about the third party viewer policy additions and related concerns. I will be representing the Third Party Viewer Community and the resident community during this interview, not specifically this project. This is not a Phoenix Office Hour and is very likely a one time thing.

During the first half hour of the show I will be asking Oz questions based on input I’ve received from third party viewer projects and the SL community. During the second half of the show I will ask Oz your questions providing they haven’t already been answered.

The interview will take place in a private region that will not be open to the public, however you will all be able to participate and watch on the live stream here. http://treet.tv/live.Ask your questions on the live stream and they will be forwarded to me, then I will ask them for you to Oz during the second half of the show.

This is a very rare and in many ways historic event that will hopefully answer all your questions and concerns in regards to the new policy changes. The policy affects you! so be informed! Mark your calendars, invite your friends and spread the word.

Who: Jessica Lyon and Oz Linden
What: Interview with Oz linden for clarifications on the new policy additions and how they effect you and the Third Party Viewers you use.
When: Wednesday, March 7th, 3pm SLT
Where: http://treet.tv/live
Why: Because it’s important!

Hope to see you on the stream!

Jessica Lyon
Project Manager

Phoenix / Firestorm Q&A Event Followup

Well, I listened to the entire 2 ½ hour playback on YouTube.

Jessica, you have the patience and diplomacy of a saint! Dealing with whining as constructive criticism is beyond the call of duty!

• The Phoenix/Firestorm team is all volunteer people, they are doing the best they can to deal with user requests in addition to features and code changes coming, sometimes without advance notice, from Linden Lab.
• It is Linden Lab’s choice to depreciate viewer 1! There is nothing any of the third party viewer development teams can do about that. Do not blame or complain to them about that. It is clear that over this next year Linden Lab will be rolling out new “features” which will involve server side code changes that everyone will have to live with . Sooner or later one of them will break viewer 1 once and for all (this could well be inventory fetching!).
• If your computer is at the lower limits of what will run SL, I’m very sorry but the minimum requirements to run SL have, and will continue to evolve. In all likelihood your only solution is a new computer.
• There are lots of new things coming to Firestorm, they are working hard to develop a viewer you will like before V2 finally dies for good. Keep test driving Firestorm (if you are not on it yet), when it is ready for you, stay there 🙂 Jessica says they did a study, people who stay on Firestorm for 3 days or more usually stay on it, even now!

Hugs and encouragement to the Phoenix/Firestorm development team. Keep up the good work, in the long run your judgment is probably better than ours. I for one will keep my complaints and whining in the jira and encourage your team in public.