Phoenix Viewer Office Hour

The Phoenix Team is going to hold an Office Hour… an open meeting in-world and streamed to the web. The meeting in-world will be at the team’s region: Phoenix Firestorm Support. This link lands you at the door to the meeting hall. You can probably figure out that single landing point is going to be stacking avatars like pancakes the day of the meeting. So, here is an alternate: PhFsSupport. It is about 20m east of the official landing point. Turn 180 and you’ll see the building.

Phoenix Meeting Notice

Phoenix Meeting Notice

The meeting will be Saturday at 1:30 PM SLT or PST… US West Coast time. The team is advising you get there 30 minutes early… Think about this. One region, one landing point, one entrance to the building… attending is going to be a problem.

The meeting will be streamed to the web: Phoenix Stream.

I suggest you make sure you are wearing no scripted items. If you do not have a script counter, get one and check yourself. You can get this free one from the Market Place: Weight Scale Script Counter. The max recommended limit is 3mb, but for this meeting the max recommended weight is ZERO.

Remove you Animation Overriders. If you use a viewer with a built in AO, turn it off. It isn’t that the built-in ones are using script memory, it is the matter of having to send animation information to other avatars increases network traffic and server load.

There is a bug that can kill a region. A fix is pending in the release channels. But, I doubt it has been rolled to the team’s region. If it hits and you watch Viewer Statistics (Ctrl-Shift-1) you will see Time Dilation go from 1.0 (good) to 0.03 (super awful) and Net Time at high values. If that is the case, stop trying to move or do anything. If you are lucky the region will recover, in 20 to 40 minutes. If not, your connection will be dropped, which is likely of you see ping going above 6,000ms.

Oh, that high ping is not reflecting your connection performance. That is about how long it is taking the server to get around to answering your viewer’s timing question. The Viewer Stats’ Ping is not like the ping you use from your computer, similar but not measuring time the same way.

Meeting Agenda

And the point of the meeting is… to address the Phoenix users, especially those that have been flaming and hating the Phoenix-Firestorm team in support and on the blog. Ummmm… this is probably going to be a meeting with a high percentage of jerks attending.

Is anyone taking bets on whether the meeting will be griefed?

Future of Phoenix

Jessica Lyon said in a blog post on the Phoenix-Firestorm site: Phoenix Firestorm Office Hour – Dec 15 (this link will eventually expire), “…the primary topic will be about Phoenix and its future.”

I find it amazing that a team that provides the most popular viewers in Second Life for free is receiving so much abuse. I can understand that people using Phoenix like the viewer and would like to keep it. But, that is not likely to be an option. So, at some point they will have to deal with that loss. Even the anticipation of the loss is not going well. So…

I believe the majority of Phoenix, and Firestorm, users are grateful for the effort the team put in and for their providing what is debatably the best viewer in Second Life. What isn’t debatable is that Firestorm and Phoenix are the most popular viewers.

The result of the popularity is the team deals with large numbers of appreciative users and large numbers of jerks. I take it this meeting will be an effort to reduce some of the anger and abuse from the self-centered jerks.

If the Phoenix Viewer is to be discontinued, as has been planned for some time, then I doubt there is any way to calm the small but vocal group unhappy with the team. While appeasement may calm some, it is not a course I recommend. Slaves, the team, are not to disobey there masters. They are to continue to provide their masters a viewer of their choice for free…

The team has put effort into creating as much of a Phoenix Viewer Interface in Firestorm as is possible. Some are not happy with the result. If it is not an EXACT replica then it isn’t good enough. Personally, I would say, “The code is open source. You do it.”

I wish the team the best and hope the meeting goes well. They have done an amazing job and deserve far more praise than I hear them getting. The new Firestorm 4.3.1-31155 is awesome and runs with a SL V3, Firestorm, Phoenix, or hybrid interface.

4 thoughts on “Phoenix Viewer Office Hour

  1. Hmmmmm a LM that will stack avatars Like pancakes. Imagine if phoenix team used virtual lanfmarks with multi lacation round robining how that might solve the problem. Maybe darius at vlmvw should tap phoe, ix on the shoulder andhave them use his vlm service.

    I hope news of fixing the stuck music streams that are now frequently happeng when arriving at a dim or even as a stream is swiyched since the new version of fs was released will be mentioned.

    As well as if they are working with LL to resolve the long standing and never reso’ved V3 Stuck frozen notification attachment handling bug. This is a major bug and no one seems to want to resolve it and we have no public jira anymore to escalate the issue.

    • Form the user side I think the JIRA Change is failing. I suspect from the Linden side it is a success. I think it has reduce the amount of JIRA text they have to wade through. But, I think it has blurred their vision and there are problems they can’t see.

      We were in regions experiencing the Sudden Lag you have been complaining about for some time. The Lindens seemed have completely forgotten about your JIRA and forum thread. So, this problem may well make continue and become a permanent problem… I suspect this is something I’ll try to take up with Alexa.

      The music streams thing is something they are working on. It is an FMOD thing and has something to do with the library used in the viewer. The Ph-FS Team is always asking Oz about it. They are doing about all that can be done.

      Attachments timing out continues to be a problem. I’ll have to try and remember to ask Oz when they may consider reviewing the JIRA Change.

  2. Also for the sake of hopefully making the instant sim hang bug issue higher profile to the LL power brokers, I am hoping the bug shows up on the phoenix sim during the event. This sim hanging bug has been around since the introduction of pathfinder and has severely impacted so many many inworld planned events.

    Maybe if it happens to one of LL most critical and influential 3Rd party developers, LL will take notice what so many other residents of sl have to deal with.

    I am going to try to attend just to watch the metrics of the sim in case it shows up.

    • I guess one can hope. I wish them well. Whether the team is aware of the problem or not, I don’t know. If you haven’t, send your info to Jessica and file a JIRA in the PH-FS JIRA.

      I’m not sure if I will make it. Saturday noon I am usually visiting friends in RL. But, weather is horrid here, so I may stay in and try to get in.

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