From time to time Firestorm doesn’t run well on my hardware. Some versions are great and others suck. I currently have problems with FS in areas with lots of mesh. But, FS has features I love and it definitely is the power users’ viewer. But, I need to take my animations with me with as little hassle as possible no matter which viewer I use.

But, I need an AO in a HUD so that it comes up the same in all my viewers. So, I forego using the FS built-in AO. A feature of AKEYO’s NITRO AO they promote is easy setup. A big point in its favor, for me, is it is a HUD. So, it will be available in all my viewers.

Minimized NITRO AO

Another point is it allows me to build sets of animations just as Firestorm does. With my old ZHAO I have different copies of the ZHAO with different sets. Yes, I could build more notecard sets and load those. But, nc’s are a pain. It is easier to include specific AO’s with outfits. There is no way to have an outfit call the AO and tell it which nc to load. But, changing AO’s requires a trip into inventory. NITRO will eliminate that step turning it into a single click.

These were enough features I decided to buy the AO. I have about 150 ‘animations’ that I use. Many are no-copy. I try to avoid no-copy because I want use them in multiple AO’s. That limit won’t be an issue with NITRO. So, I rounded them up, broke a couple of my favorite AO’s and dumped them all into the NITRO.

Getting Started

WARNING: 12/24/2015 – After working with this AO for a time I find that I am limited in how many animations I can place in the unit. Somewhere between placing 50 to 150 animations the unit, it fails. 

The AO comes boxed. One clicks on the box to open it and finds there are 3 items; a link, note card, and the HUD. The note card has instructions and links to more help on the web. To setup the AO one rezzes it on the floor and drags animations from inventory and drops them in the AO.

The v1.1 AO uses 1,856k of memory and has 29 scripts. Testing in Rathais about 29 of them are running.  A ZHAO uses 32k of memory and 2 scripts. So, script-wise this is a pretty heavy AO. NITRO adds about 3 to 5 Events per second with peaks up to 15 to 20. So, it isn’t a heavy load on the sim CPU. It is about the same as my ZHAO-II. But, that 2mb of memory is pretty heavy for events. This is the only point that has given me second thoughts about using this AO.

NITRO Web Page AO Setup

You have probably rez’d AO’s and other HUD’s to the ground and found many are only visible from one direction. That can create problems for new or inexperienced users. The NITRO AO doesn’t present that problem. As the image shows, 5 sides have images making it easy to see when rez’d. In use the 4 sides are switched to be the visible face of the AO. It is a nice idea because once the AO renders there is no delay changing between faces. We just see an instant change.

Additional Page links below…