Firestorm

Firestorm Blocking Update

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Today Jessica Lyon posted on the Firestorm blog about Saturday’s 3 hour Q & A meeting. See: Q&A – Don’t be surprised… be informed.

In the comments the key question was asked. When will Phoenix blocking start? Jessica answered:

We haven’t decided yet what we will do with Phoenix. I may not have been clear at the meeting but the 3 version rule will start as of now, existing builds don’t really fall into the rule because we expect SSA will kill them off anyways. However if after SSA is fully deployed for a few weeks, we see there are still thousands on Phoenix, we ‘may’ decide to block it. I would rather avoid that if I could though.

Explosive Firestorm Meeting

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This is going to be controversial and upset a lot of people. What it is, is a two hour and 45 minute video of a Firestorm meeting that showed up on YouTube. I didn’t see any announcement of the meeting. I do watch for such announcements. Some get past me. Whatever, there is some hot news in the video. If your in a hurry to see what is going to upset people, look for the red text (hint: page 2).

The video below is from a Firestorm-in-development viewer. It shows Materials in Firestorm. This version has not yet been released it is coming. It is not the video of the meeting.

[youtube gAdKIvbnQtA]

I doubt many will have time for watching the whole three hours of video of the August 10th Q & A meeting. I have a link to it at the end of the article. I decided to index it while I worked my way through it. It would be great if it were an MP3. I could play at 1.5x speed.

I am paraphrasing the whole video index I’ve made. My biases and prejudices can color what I hear. So, if something tics you off, watch the video then start your rant.

This is a Firestorm Q&A meeting where Jessica Lyon gets into some hard to swallow news. This is the end of the Phoenix Viewer.

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Second Life News 2013-30 #2

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Some of the most interesting news comes from the Third Party Developers meetings. This is not a meeting that is well publicized. I suspect many think that having just the well informed attend is more productive. I tend to agree.

This article is 2,600+ words. It has some work-around methods for some current problems that people are experiencing. It covers some of the most informative news about SL that is available.

TPV Dev Meetin 2013-30
TPV Dev Meetin 2013-30

Server Side Appearance

SSA is going extraordinary well. The stats coming in are as expected, which means the backend is performing as expected. This means the Lab’s estimates for the amount of hardware needed are going to be correct.

View adoption is going pretty well. About 75% of users have adopted an SSA capable viewer. (84% of Firestorm users – see chart) Looking at that the other way, something like a quarter million people login each day with an old viewer. Also, the numbers vary quite a bit from day to day. 

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Firestorm Viewer 4.4.2-34167 Released

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I see late yesterday the FS Team released viewer 4.4.2. There is an announcement on the FS Blog: Mandatory Firestorm 4.4.2 Update. This version fixes the problem of overloading the Linden stats servers. Users would not notice a problem. So, many might not update and stats indicate that would be the case. The result is this is a mandatory update.

Firestorm Viewer Download is here. Look in the right hand column, white area.

Firestorm Splash Screen
Firestorm Splash Screen

You may have found that your 4.4.1 viewer will no longer login. You get an update message on the splash screen. If you close it and attempt to login, you get another notice and the viewer does not login. If you close that one and attempt to login again, you find you are in a loop. The viewer is not going to login because the FS Team has told it not to. It is blocked by the FS Team. 

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Viewer Updates 2013-27

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We seem to be coming to a crunch point in viewers. The Lab is changing things so quickly third party developers have a challenge keeping up. Henri Beauchamp does well with Cool VL Viewer, which is a viewer based on V3 code with a vintage V1 user interface.

Kitty
Image by Kitty Barnett

Niran seems to have leapfrogged the Niran’s Viewer to having all the latest Linden features by jumping to a recent SL Viewer V3 model. Niran’s Viewer is now Nirans Black Dragon viewer. Niran’s features from previous versions are being added to the new SL V3 Viewer code in Black Dragon. Eventually Niran will have Black Dragon on a feature par with his previous versions.

So, both of those viewers have materials. Firestorm 4.4.1 doesn’t and Tonya Souther of the Firestorm Team explains why, in a blog post: Tracking LL’s big changes, and why the 4.4.2… well now that there is an emergency roll out… 4.4.3 version won’t either. 

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Firestorm 4.4.2 Emergency Rollout

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Emergency Bug Fix

The 4.4.1 version has a bug. It is going to get re-called the version 4.4.2 will be rolled out ASAP. This version will NOT need a clean install. You’ll see this hit today or tomorrow. It seems this version has a bug that overloads the stats server. Once the roll is available the 4.4.1 viewer will be blocked.

As of NOW the 4.4.1 version download is blocked.

The 4.4.2 version is not yet ready.

See: Emergency 4.4.2 Coming