Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Saturday 9/3 is/was Firestorm Viewer’s sixth year out. Well, Phoenix-Firestorm. They announced it this morning. They tend not to say much until just before they open doors. I think that is to keep the region they invite people to for a party from being over run.
See the announcement: Happy 6th Birthday Firestorm Project.
Congratulations! Well done.
There is a bug in the new Firestorm 4.7.9 and Second Life 4.0.7. The bug is not much of a problem unless you play in combat games. Whirly Fizzle explains it:
Yep, it’s a bug on Firestorm 4.7.9.
I saw you already found the JIRA issue, but here it is for anyone else having the same problem:http://jira.phoenixviewer.com/browse/FIRE-19640
Workarounds for this one:
If you are wearing an attachment using llTakeControls, take it off. That’s the trigger for the bug.
It may not be viable to remove all attachments using llTakeControls though. This bug is mostly annoying combat people who use mouselook a lot & many weapons use llTakeControls in such a way that they will trigger this bug when they exit mouselook.
Switching to the LL viewer is a no go – although it doesn’t have this specific bug, it has a related bug which breaks being able to shoot pretty much all weapons in mouselook when an attachment is worn using llTakeControls or the weapon itself uses llTakeControls – BUG-11602
Best bet honestly is to roll back to 4.7.7 if this bug is annoying you too much. (Reference)
If you are playing a combat game, add your name and information to the JIRA’s.
The main viewer has updated to version 4.0.7.318301. This was formerly the Maintenance RC Viewer. There are a lot of fixes in this update. Oz Linden points out that work is being done to prevent viewer crashes. This release dropped the crash rate by 4%, which is huge.
One fix in that line is in the image processing. When video memory filled up and there was no way for the viewer to handle the texture… it crashed. Now it will simply skip rendering the texture and color the object gray.
Earlier today I was thinking Firestorm would release soon and it was later in the day, Monday. The announcement is here: Firestorm Release 4.7.9-50527. Inara has her coverage here: Firestorm 4.7.9.50527: “I see jelly people!”
Mac and Linux users lose the Havok add-on features for Pathfinding and mesh uploading. Inara has more details on that subject.
This brings Firestorm on par with the Lab’s version 4.0.6, the current main viewer. But, we may see a new Linden version promoted this or next week. Firestorm is scheduled for its next release in 3 months.
Rumor was we would see a new version release this past week. The source was good. But, it didn’t happen.
As I pointed out, the flurry of wiki updates I normally see wasn’t happening. That changed Sunday. So, a release is likely… soon.
That would be great. Because the 64-bit version I use eats all my 8GB RAM in less than an hour. I have had VBO enabled. I just disabled it and will be watching to see if that helps.
There is no roll to the main channel this week. See DEPLOYS. The package running on the RC channels last week did not promote. The RC package did update and will roll out tomorrow, Wednesday. The bug found is: Fix for BUG-37573 “Rez silently fails on RC Magnum, RC LeTigre and RC BlueSteel regions”
The main viewer remains 4.06.315555.