Firestorm

Second Life and the Mac WebKit Problem

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Me... a Protester?
Me… a Protester?

 My readers will know Mac users have a problem. There is no near term solution to the problem for several reasons. Even more confusing is there are multiple problems. And today a group approached me hoping to put together a movement to show Linden Lab the extent of the problem and the interest in getting it fixed.

So, I’m scratching my head wondering if the Lab is in a position to fix the problem… and which problem are we talking about? Since I’m not a Mac user, I’m probably not the best one to write this, but no one else seems to be covering it.

I’ve touched on Mac issues in the past; Second Life News 2013-11, Firestorm Viewer News 2014-7, Viewer Release Pipeline Update, and others. The SL Viewer and Third Party Viewers are moving to support Apple’s Cocoa frame work or may be I should say did so move in 2013. But, that has left Apple users on older operating systems behind. SL apparently has problems running in the older Apple OS’s. This has resulted in Apple users staying with older viewer versions.

As we near another release of the Firestorm Viewer those issues are coming to a crisis point for some users. The recent blocking of Firestorm 4.4.0 is bringing home the point of the team only allowing 3 versions to run on the SL grid and blocking older versions. People are getting the idea the team is actually blocking older viewers. 

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Firestorm Viewer 4.4.0 To Be Blocked

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Firestorm Logo
Firestorm Logo

 You may remember a time when there were something like 1600 different versions of viewers in Second Life on any given day. The problem with that is it so dilutes crash stats developers are hampered. There isn’t enough data on any single version to provide a developer good information for tracking down a bug.

The Firestorm Team decided they would do something to help their developers. The decision was to limit the number of versions of Firestorm on the grid at any one time to 3. They block their old viewers and prevent users from logging into Second Life with old viewers. I’m not sure if that blocking includes use on other grids.

In this case ‘old’ means not one of the current three newest versions. Currently version 4.4.0 is the fourth running version. The team is announcing that on Thursday they will block that version. There are about 5500 people using that version. They are encouraged to update now rather than wait until they’re blocked on Thursday.

See: Blocking Version 4.4.0 – 33720.

Firestorm: A Joke… Not So Much

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Firestorm Logo
Firestorm Logo

 The Firestorm Viewer Team is thinking. Their recent April Fool’s Joke about the Dynamic User Interface (DUI), the detachable control panels, has been the goal of many developers for some time. Now Firestorm Team member Nicky Dasmijn has built a proof of concept version of the viewer with those detachable panels. In this version window and panel layouts can be saved for later use.

There is no release version of this viewer, beta or otherwise. But the team is releasing the code some other developers can work on the project. The Firestorm Team is hoping the code will inspire developers to come up with new innovations for the Second Life viewer.

See the official announcement here: The real joke… DUI is no joke!

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Second Life News 2014-11 #3

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Viewer Candidates

Hot Fix Viewer 3.7.4.287875 – Monty Linden is doing most of the work on this one. Fixes include problems with a FMODEX (sound) race condition and other problems. The working fixes in this one are important but are not the problems they hoped to solve.

The main emphasis here is getting the SL Viewer crash rate down. If this version can accomplish that it will move to the top of this for promotion to the main viewer.

Interesting Viewer 3.7.3.287127 – This is the viewer that has better caching and scene loading. This iteration has 12 fixes to previous versions.

Merchant Outbox Viewer 3.7.3.287344 – This has about 8 fixes, one being A Windows 7 crash when exiting the viewer. So, if you have been losing settings made recently, this may be the fix. 

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Firestorm Update

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Firestorm Logo
Firestorm Logo

I am finding that I can’t stay logged into SL for more than a couple of hours, if that long, before the viewer starts to lag out. I have mini freezes and periods where the frame rate (FPS – Frames per Second) drops to 2 or 3 and PING jumps up into the thousands of milli-seconds.

Testing with the OS ping to the SL servers at the same time I am not seeing those long times. Nor with the SL Viewer am I seeing those long ping times. Also, I had occurrences of the screen going black then coming back. There is some kind of video problem happening.

I just added the 335.23 driver to my GTX560. So, it should be good. But, doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem. 

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