Firestorm Viewer News 2014-7

Teleport to

This is a feature that Firestorm has and has had for some time. A person can find another person’s name, right click on it and teleport to them. It is kinda fun.

Jonathan Yap (I hope I spelled that right, its late and I’m tired.) wrote the code that is appearing in the SL Viewer and the Lab is wanting in third party viewers to adopt. You click on a name and REQUEST teleport. The target person says yes or no. If yes, you teleport to them otherwise you do not.

The Firestorm Team has combined the two teleport-features in the Firestorm Viewer. So, if you are in a region that allows teleport anywhere in the region, you can do the older teleport to in current versions or the new request teleport. It is your choice. If the region uses a teleport-to-designated-landing-point only, the feature will default only to the teleport request. You don’t have a choice. There will be no teleport to option in that case.

There is a use case for teleport to. Region and estate managers often need to teleport to troublemakers. This gives them that ability. Support people often have the same need to reach people that need help. Jessica feels the Lab is not all that happy with the team’s decision to keep teleport to. But, feels it is an important feature users want.

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Firestorm will have this feature. It is not Jessica’s favorite feature.

Region Restart Warning

Various region restart warnings have been tried in SL Viewers. Still I miss those warning from time to time and get kicked out of a region. Jonathan Yap wrote a revision to the warning signal. It shakes the whole SL image in the viewer. This is a warning that it should not be possible to miss if you are looking at the screen, no matter how intensely you may be focused on some small part of the screen.

You also get a big noise and a big message in the middle of your screen. Between the three you should get the idea the region is restarting and have time to run for it.

The FS Team thought the shake was too much. So, they have made it optional in Firestorm. The default is to have shake enabled.

64-Bit Viewer

Firestorm will have a 64-bit ‘release’ version for Windows and a beta version for Linux. The Linux version has some media and search problems. There will be no 64-bit Mac version. Now that Cinder is gone there is no one on that project.

This 64-bit viewer is very stable for most people.

The Windows 64-bit installer is S L O W. It took Jessica 16 minutes to install it. Be patient. It is installing.

Miscellaneous

Animation Explorer – This is back in Firestorm. It was in Phoenix long ago. It will be in the coming release.

Contact Sets – I didn’t understand what this is. I did get previously made sets will work in the new version. They will have a class on it.

Texture Export – it works.

There are a load of updates and fixes in this release. Wait for the release notes. There is too much to write in. Jessica was starting to read a long boring list…

Stuff from the Exodus Viewer is being imported to Firestorm. No one is seeing much development on Exodus. So, Exodus users are coming over to Firestorm. They are asking for some of the features that made Exodus popular. So, the team is adding them in.

Summary

Firestorm is the most popular viewer in Second Life. More people use it than any other viewer. In general I like it. I prefer cutting edge viewers, even with the problems they have. For now that is the SL Viewer. But, we may see Firestorm catch up this year. I still have some doubts as to whether they can.

Whether they do or not, Firestorm remains a popular power user’s viewer. More features are being added for photographers and machinimists and will likely take over those slots too. But, people already have to go to school to learn how to use the viewer. Is there a danger of it becoming too feature heavy and people seeing it as overwhelming? I don’t know. You make the call.

I know that if I need to build in Second Life or have a reason requiring me to be on for more than a two-hour stretch in a have-to situation, Firestorm is the viewer I plan to use.

And they have the best support going.

6 thoughts on “Firestorm Viewer News 2014-7

  1. Maybe Ebbe Altberg can let Apple know how the Apple code structure is a fail . CEO to CEO. How many laptops will Apple sell if they don’t run 3d games?

    I know a lot of creators use macs so people no longer being able to function in world is more than just more people logging off. The creative end and commerce will be damaged.

    I am major disgusted with this whole thing — to spend programming time so a few people can hop up and down with some visor on their heads flapping their arms but ignore working on a platform for customers with more expensive machines who probably have more money to spend in SL and who probably do more creative work is long term death.

    And from what I read fitted mesh will be an eyesore for apple users — why stay in world to see that?

    Seems like the sky did fall for mac users and no fix in sight–

  2. Just clearing things out about the HTTP (llcorehttp) changes: they are publicly available in the viewer-http branch (and, for some older changes dealing with LLHttpClient and Curl, in viewer-sunshine), so they are not just in a “private release” and anyone can test them and backport them; the latest changes have been backported to the Cool VL Viewer (all branches) as soon as they were published, in early January this year.

    I do concur with your statement about Monty’s code quality: he did things the right way, he did spot and fix the weaknesses in the old code, and his code is mostly bug-free.

    • Thanks for clearing up ‘private release.’ I got a different take listening to the videos. I expected things to be as you describe. It just didn’t sound that way, at least to me. Thanks.

  3. Thanks, Nalates, now I understand why recent releases of the SL and Firestorm viewers, both incorporating the latest CHUI code, have so many issues with my (old) Macs — namely, the chat lag bug where keystrokes take seconds, nay, sometimes even minutes, to appear on screen.

    I found it so strange that it has affected Mac users for so many months without even the slightest hint on what could be done to fix the issue. I guess it’s “unfixable” — because the framework was changed and it’s unlikely that anyone (either at LL, or the TPVs) will ever go back to the old code?

    It’s such a pity, really. The latest incarnation of viewers give me almost twice the performance (in FPS) than the “old” ones, which is simply too dramatic to be ignored. But… at the cost of forfeiting text chat, which is unacceptable. This is a tragic dilemma!

    • At least they are working on Chat…

      Apple required adoption of Cocoa. This has proved to be a problem for most Apple developers and certainly for SL devs.

  4. Pingback: Second Life and the Mac WebKit Problem | Nalates' Things & Stuff

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