The Region Restart warnings have been changed. This is a warning that a lot of us would miss. Of course, the result is when the region restarts our avatars get booted out of Second Life. Now this warning is really interface. In the SL Viewer the entire screen shakes and you get a message in the middle of the screen. There’s nothing do about the shaking. I haven’t seen it yet but I understand the Firestorm Viewer has an option to turn off the screen shakes. The shaking apparently annoys some people.

The restart messages also now include the region name. This will be a big help when you get a restart message just as your teleporting. Did the message come from the region you left or the region you entered? Now we will know.

I think a really neat feature is the addition of an option on Landmarks in inventory to have them shown on the World Map. It is a right-click option.

Another inventory feature is items that are LINKS to the real inventory item will now be marked as links.

RLV has been updated to version RLVa-1.4 .10 and uses API version 2.8.0. The update includes a couple changes I don’t quite understand and five or six fixes. I don’t use RLV features that often, but there are places in Second Life where it is great fun.

This version of the Firestorm Viewer has changes and additions to its language translated versions. Along with language come some viewer skin improvements.

There are some fixes to Windelight and the new sky setting the fixes bad shadowing and black stars. I’m not sure what that’s about other than some kind of rendering problem.

The PhotoTools and the Firestorm Viewer have been updated with changes and additions. They have video tutorial here: Firestorm PhotoTools Video Tutorial (20± minutes – There is a series of tutorials on YouTube made by Resident Paperwork). They have additional documentation here: Firestorm PhotoTools Documentation.

This version of the viewer gets the ability to import avatar shapes. In most viewers you can go into the menu under Develop –> Avatar –> Character Tests –> Appearance to XML and export an avatar shape you have created. In this release you will be able to right-click the avatar and select Edit Shape where there is now an import button.

There are a number of other fixes for builders and scripters.

From the Phoenix Viewer the Animation Explore has been added to the Firestorm Viewer.

Firestorm has new tools for working with Contact Cards and building them into sets. If you’re working with lots of people in world the Contact Sets can be very handy.

Spam Protection got an overhaul. Look in: Preferences –> Firestorm –> Protection –> Enable Spam Protection.

Firestorm now has a new Debug Setting: FSConversationLogLifetime. This allows the user to choose the number of days transcripts are preserved in the conversation log before being purged. The current default is 30 days.

Summary

The list of features and fixes is huge. You can see the list, rich in links to explanations, in the Firestorm Wiki Release Notes.

There’s still a good-sized list of Known Issues. You’ll see the list in the release notes. The only one I’ll mention is FIRE-11322 – Sixty-second-long freezes when opening Preferences or IM tabs. This was a problem in the SL Viewer some time ago. I’ve been reading the release notes and writing and have got to try out the viewer yet. So don’t know if this problem is really there. If it is, you’ll know what’s happening.

This appears to be an awesome release of Firestorm. It may even be the catch up point for the Firestorm Viewer. This version of Firestorm adds many features the SL Viewer does not have. Plus, adding Fitted Mesh for all practical purposes, from a user perspective, catches the Firestorm Viewer up with the SL Viewer.

I’m not expecting the Firestorm Viewer to become the overall technology leader. I do expected to be a combination of leading and lagging. The Firestorm Team seems to have reached the point where they’re adding more user requested features. I expect the team to stay ahead of Linden Lab in this respect.

The Lab is adding technological advances. Things like HTTP and new inventory API’s and other server-side changes. In this area the Firestorm Team is going to continue to lag behind the Lab. There just isn’t much that can be done about that. One cannot take advantage of the server side changes until a know about the changes.

Provided this version works well, and I expect it to, I think this will be a very popular viewer, even more so than it already is.

I’ll be playing with the viewer today and probably writing more for tomorrow.