Firestorm

Second Life News 2017 w35

by

I’m a day late… busy with other things. I try to get the update out on Tuesday. That gives the Lindens a day to look at data from the weekend and decide what gets updates rolled out or queued for more attention.

Servers

The main channel was restarted and updated to #17.08.11.328152. This adds the MIME Type changes for HTTP with LSL talked about here: MIME Type changes for HTTP with LSL.

As of the time I am writing this a package for Blue Steel and Le Tigre has yet to be decided on.

● i see you ●
● i see you ●

Magnum will get #17.08.22.507928, internal fixes… Simon Linden says there are no user-visible changes… Apparently, the changes are switching built tools. Sort of like building the same car on a different assembly line.

If you are into the tech on your region, you may have noticed restarting regions restart faster now. I hear it takes about 6 to 7 minutes. But, regions are doing double restarts. The region restarts but comes back online with the same version as before the restart. Then an hour or so later restarts again then comes up running the new version.

Read more

Second Life Photography Tutorials

by

Flickr has a ton of Second Life™ images. Today: 2,901,249 images. Some are pretty bad, others REALLY kinky, and some amazingly gorgeous. For the people interested in SL Photography William Weaver has made 12 video tutorials. They are about using the Firestorm Viewer’s Photo and Camera Tools and controlling Windlight.

There is a well thought out design for these tools. The tutorial shown here shows how to take advantage of the tools and use them efficiently. Subsequent tutorials show how to use the various aspects of SL lighting to create great images.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6XiUkyPQ-w

Phototools Tutorial: 01 – Interface Introduction

This is a 4-year old starting tutorial giving an overview of the Photo Tools. The tutorials advance over those 4-years to the 12th tutorial streamed live a week ago.

Note: 2020-05 – Some of these tutorials were taken down then later put back, and now some are ‘private’. It seems to be changing. I can’t predict which will appear and which will disappear. Good luck.

I’ve covered some of these as individual tutorials over the years.

William Weaver also has a Flickr channel plus, a marketplace store, and additional art is on Issuu. Numerous SL bloggers have covered his art at various times.

Second Life News 2017 w/32

by

Servers

Corrections made 8/9

The main channel was updated with version #17.07.27.327933 this morning, Tuesday. Last week the main channel was running version #17.07.11.327548. Both of these are listed as having “internal changes”. Geek-speak for changing data reporting, debugging, and performance information… usually.

Street at sunset
Street at sunset

Blue Steel, Le Tigre, and Magnum were supposed to update to #17.07.27.327933 tomorrow, Wednesday. But, Simon tells us that isn’t going to happen. There probably won’t be a restart as they restarted with last week’s update. The Lindens try to restart regions once every two-weeks even if there is no planned update.

No big problem, but enough of one the Lindens decided to hold the RC update back. It had to do with regions names not being applied correctly in the restart, so they never appeared to come online.

The Deploys thread is dying. There is very little discussion or information to be gleaned from reading the posts. They are basically a day, time, and link to release notes. So, I suspect fewer people are reading the posts. I expect the posts to go away at some point.

Read more

Second Life – Machinima Settings

by

Strawberry Singh has released a tutorial for those making machinimas using the Firestorm Viewer. You’ll find it here: Second Life Vlogging & Machinima Viewer Tips. It is, of course, a video but. It is backed up with a text version too, good for quick reference. Click the image to jump to YouTube.

Machinima Tips – Click for YouTube

I use both the Firestorm and Linden viewers for capturing video. I do think Firestorm is a better choice for most video capture scenarios. I used the Linden viewer as I better knew how to use its voice controls. As Learn how better to control sound I am moving to Firestorm. But, I was curious how many of the Firestorm features are in the Linden viewers.

As I worked through Singh’s list I found the Linden viewer has pretty much the same controls. But, they are way easier to get to and to use with Firestorm. If this were a ‘features’ contest, I would say Firestorm wins on presentation.

Read more

Pages: 1 2

Second Life – Third-Party Dev’s UG Meeting 2017 w27

by

Very short meeting, 20± minutes. Nothing new. Just status updates.

The first subject was the JIRA spamming. For now, the JIRA is locked down, no comments. There is no idea how long it will take to build a spam block.

Viewers

The Alex Ivy viewer is out as the main viewer. It will update soon as a couple of problems were found. The Lindens are working on the launcher that figures out if it should load the 32 or 64-bit version of the viewer. They are also adding a setting to allow the user to override the automatic detection and force install of one or the other.

Read more

Firestorm 5.07 Released – Should you update? Why?

by

Tuesday the 19th, a new Firestorm Viewer version was released, 5.0.7.52912.

You can download and install this new version. There is no need to remove the previous version you are using. Some of us (yes, me) have noticed it crashes shortly after its first launch. On the second and subsequent launches, it seems fine.

The Girl with the Sun in Her Hair VIII
The Girl with the Sun in Her Hair VIII

I suggest you restart your computer before installing. Inara in her review of this release (here), recommends backing up your viewer settings before starting the install. I didn’t have to restore any settings. BUT… if you are changing from 32 to 64-bit version, a settings backup is a good idea.

The Firestorm team has a goal to release an update every 3 months. It has been 6 months since the last release. So, there is a lot of work in this new release. Plus, they say it is very well tested.

Read more