Firestorm has their new viewer out as of 1 AM (SLT?) Oct 1, 2019. The announcement is here Firestorm 6.3.2 Released. This is a major update and good news for Second Life™ users. However, it is a mess for OpenSim users as this version crashes OpenSim servers. It is explained in the FS announcement.

BoM Viewer Comparison

This version of Firestorm is a mix of current Linden Viewer features and features from RC versions of the Linden Viewer. So, this would be a viewer actually ahead of the Linden Viewer feature and bug-fix-wise. That hasn’t happened in a long time.

This version is a must-have update. Without this update, you will start to see avatars with blue and yellow textures poking through their skin and clothes. Over time the problem will get worse as more people move to BoM attire. Fortunately, most of the third-party viewers have implemented BoM support. Singularity does not yet have BoM support. I think it may be the only one.

Inara has a good-sized article on this Firestorm release. See FIRESTORM 6.3.2: WELCOME TO BAKES ON MESH. The article includes a number of handy links for learning about BoM, to the SL Forum topic, Slink and Maitreya BoM instructions, and a link to Firestorm’s BoM Wiki article.

I made my first BoM outfit using Slink Redux, Blueberry, and JustBecause. And I made my first DOH-mistake. The clothes fit my Slink Original-Classic body pretty well. The Blueberry top very well. But I had been playing with the Slink HUD and had the Appearance items enabled for the Redux body. So, the top did not fit in the cleavage area and the pants had more skin showing through. I’m all ‘Oh NO’ I have to make alpha layers. But once I disabled those Appearance items, Blueberry fit perfectly and my JustBecause slacks almost fit. I still had to make an alpha layer for the slacks.

Slink Redux HUD

The BoM alpha layers thing is far more flexible than the onion skin body alpha cuts. But it is also tedious. I expect someone to make something to reduce the pain.

This version has a feature that allows one to use an external editor to edit note cards… I’m not sure why one would need this feature.

The feature adds an ‘edit’ button to the lower left of the floater. Click and by default, it opens the Windows Notepad editor. You can change which editor is used in Preferences->Firestorm->Build 1(tab). The change process will likely walk you into some Windows permission issues, depending on where your editor’s EXE file is located. I suspect you can get around that by running Firestorm as an administrator… yeah, that is safe… NOT.

I did get it changed over to use NotePad++ without much hassle. But trying to use MS Word was a problem.

As you might expect embedded Land Marks, images, and other links do not work with an external editor. I haven’t tested to see how far one can push this or if there are workarounds.

This version has a bunch of render pipeline fixes. Read the details here. If you are a Mac user, for sure read the notes. Plus, there is new stuff for using Discord from within the viewer. The release notes are here.

I am just so happy BoM is here.