Firestorm

Firestorm Team Thank You

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Jessica Lyon has posted on the Firestorm Viewer blog a thank you to the SL community. They have been raising funds mostly to pay for the Kakadu license.

Kakadu used to get lots of coverage in the SL blogosphere. Not so much anymore. Kakadu is the software Linden Lab and Firestorm developers license to handle compression and decompression of images.

Firestorm Support Jacket - Link farther down the page
Firestorm Support Jacket – Link farther down the page

You may not know that Linden Lab stores all images/textures in JPEG2000 format. The format offers the advantage of faster and smaller downloads and larger and slower downloads by having different resolution images efficiently stored in one image file. While the format is an ISO standard, the process of getting an image into and out of JPEG2000 format is proprietary. There are open source libraries developers can use to make and use JPEG2000 format files. They aren’t the same as Kakadu.

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Second Life News Week 2 – #2

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This past week a Third Pary Develpoers’ meeting was held. Not much in the way of NEW news, but lots of updates… except for one big block buster.

Cyborg
Cyborg

Viewers

The Maintenance RC got prompted Friday morning and is now the main SL viewer: 4.0.1-310054. If you have been having problems and low FPS this release should help. This version is the second main viewer with the CEF. It also has lots of fixes. 

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Firestorm News Week 1

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It is probably important for some to know that Firestorm Viewer 4.7.1 Public Beta will be blocked starting tomorrow 1/7/16. Reference Also, after the next release (February? March?) the version 4.6.9, used by Windows XP and Mac 10.6 users, will be blocked.

Help

The Firestorm Team has made a second request for help with their gateway project. This time they are asking for user testimonials. They will be adding these to their web gateway pages that lead new users to their gateway regions. See: Share Your Love of Second Life with a Testimonial.

Firestorm Gateway Dec 2015
Firestorm Gateway Dec 2015

If you have a blog or other web site, you can help by linking to Firestorm’s gateway landing pages. See their ‘share’ post for a list of the 6 landing pages. You’ll also find them in my blog roll. 

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Ghost Town Screw Ups

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This time I’ll warn you up front, the title is a deliberately ambiguous headline.

Ghost Town Welcome Sign
Ghost Town Welcome Sign

We have lots of interesting Second Life™ promotions stuff going on. Firestorm is asking for people to submit photos: Share your photos this weekend to promote Second Life. The photos will go in the Firestorm Gateway section of Flickr. Canary Beck is moderating the photo pool. It has 4,678 images as I write this.

CAUTION: SPOILER AHEAD!

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Wow! What came out at the TPV Dev Meeting?

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There was a Third Party Developers’ meeting this past week. Of course Project Bento was a main topic and Vir Linden was there to talk about and respond to comments in the Feedback thread of the forum. So, what did we learn?

Can I tell you a little secret?
Can I tell you a little secret?

Viewers

The Second Life Valhalla Viewer version 4.0.0.307894 was promoted to default viweer status Thursday 12/17. This viewer has fixes for Bento, which mean little as Bemto animations and avatars are not yet allowed on the main grid. It also changes from Webkit to CEF – Chromium Embedded framework.

Co-Routines or Second Life HTTP Update Viewer version 3.8.7.308134 is merging with the Second Life Vivox Viewer version 3.8.7.307744 and will reappear in RC as a single viewer named… we don’t know.

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