Firestorm Considerations

The FS Team is working on Materials, Sunshine, and adopting the CHUI to Firestorm. I am sure they would love to see all of those in 4.4.2. But, they aren’t saying what they will be able to do because they haven’t even been able to get all the Lab’s code for these features. The Lab is just not done with it. Things are changing as it is developed. You don’t try to hang pictures in a house before the walls are built.

Firestorm Viewer 4.4.1
Firestorm Viewer 4.4.1

The FS Team asked the Lindens if their release of a new viewer requiring a cache clear is loading up the asset server. Monty Linden says the asset system has lots of head room and is not the likely bottle neck. But, the inventory system that tracks what you have in your inventory is near capacity. Consider the inventory an index that deals with permissions and lots of interactions between you and backend systems of SL.

Jessica has explained that people are convinced clearing cache solves every problem and speeds up their viewer. The opposite is true. But, sometimes without a stop watch people cannot get past their subjective impression.

Whatever the case, it looks like the Lab is going to start making plans to look at cache operation. Monty Linden is going to take a look to see how a Firestorm-clear-your-cache release may be affecting the SL servers.

Most of the current inventory problems are with inventory cache, which is not the same as the basic cache. It is possible to clear inventory cache and not clear the basic cache of textures, mesh, and objects. But, it is a clear that has to be done manually.

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Firestorm Releases 4.4.1

About 21 hours ago the Firestorm blog announced the release of Firestorm Viewer version 4.4.1-34164. From the teams point of view this is a MUST UPDATE TO release. If you are running the newest version of Firestorm 4.4.0, you STILL need to update to the new viewer.

Firestorm Viewer 4.4.1
Firestorm Viewer 4.4.1

A number of users have reported problems with the 4.4.0 viewer that have kept them from using it. The team has made every effort they could in the time frame available to fix problem discovered in 4.4.0. They believe they have fixed the majority of problems blocking use of 4.4.0. So, 4.4.1 should work for you.

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Firestorm Update 2013-26

If you are wondering why Firestorm does not yet have materials and releases I expected didn’t make it out last week, it is the CHUI (Chat Hub UI). Getting the CHUI code from the Lab to work with the Firestorm code is a challenge. It took the Lab about a year, hearsay on my part, to get CHUI working in the SL Viewer.

The Firestorm team has only had the code a few weeks. The Lab keeps adding fixes and that is not likely to speed things up for the Firestorm team.

That CHUI is the hold up leads to the question, what does CHUI have to do with materials? Well, consider what Tonya Souther posted on SLUniverse, “The problem isn’t that the materials code depends on the CHUI code directly. The problem is that the merge process depends heavily on code changes being applied in the same order to the same files.

The CHUI changes hit a large part of the viewer codebase. (That’s why it took LL a year to get CHUI out the door.) Inevitably, those changes hit files that the materials project changed. When they do, if you don’t merge in the CHUI changes first, then you have to do a lot more work to fit the materials project changes into the code – work that you’ll have to undo when you finally get around to putting the CHUI changes in, or will have to do over and over if you ignore the CHUI changes altogether.”

They are down to about 20 merge issues. Then the team has to run it through QA. So, this may take longer than I anticipated… or not.

Second Life News 2013-25

Viewer changes are picking up speed. As the new multi-channel process moves forward we will see more viewer projects moving forward. Some of these things are things I’ve written about weeks and months ago.  Now they are coming to a viewer near you.

TPV Dev's Meeting 2013-24
TPV Dev’s Meeting 2013-24

Inara has written an update on the SSA (Server Side Appearance): SL projects update 24 (5). See it for details. The summary of that news is simple. We are likely to see SSA enabled over the next 2 to 6 weeks. I expect it to SLOWLY creep across the grid. The server side code has already been rolled out to the main channel. Now it is just a matter of enabling it on the regions. But, there are concerns about problems and whether the new servers can carry the load. So, this will be a very careful roll out.

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Viewer Stability 2013-23

The Third Party Viewers List is ordered by crash rates with the highest crash rate last. It is interesting to look at this list and see which viewers are better or worse from previous weeks.

Yesterday the list was updated. Surprisingly Firestorm lost its first place position. That needs some explaining, because I think Firestorm is the most stable viewer going.

First off Radegast holds first place in the list. BUT it is a non-graphical viewer. It is a text only viewer. So, it lacks most of the code that has problems, the 3D rendering pipeline. So, I don’t count it.

Yesterday the SL Beta Viewer 3.6.0 moved ahead of Firestorm 4.4.0. Well yay! Linden Lab. Congratulations.

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Firestorm Post: 4.4.1 Coming

To go along with the Linden blog post about Server Side Appearance (baking) Jessica has published an article on where the FS Team is with the next release of Firestorm. See: Server Side Baking on the Way!

Jessica is trying to get 145,000 Firestorm and Phoenix users to upgrade their viewers. These are just the users that are on older viewers that will not support SSA. She says the majority of FS/PH users have switched to the newer 4.4.0 viewer. Still 145k users is a bunch.

I expect the SL forum to get lots of new users when SSA is enabled on the servers. They’ll all be there asking WTH? Avoid being one of those people, update to a viewer with SSA support.