Firestorm

Firestorm Update 2013-26

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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

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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

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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

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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.

 

Second Life Mesh Rendering Problems

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Each week the blog Lette’s Trivia And Trivial Stuff publishes the week’s top support issues with the Firestorm viewer. Another issue is out. But, some issues are not limited to the Firestorm Viewer. One of those is mesh objects failing to render.

Lette has written up an excellent section on the problem. She focuses on: MeshMaxConcurrentRequests. This is a Debug Setting in both the Firestorm and SL Viewers.

Word on the virtual street is that setting this higher is better and a must. Well… as often is the case the general advice is wrong. It depends on your computer and connection. But, in general it is a bad thing to change. To solve specific problems it is an acceptable temporary fix. But, used as a permanent change, it is a lag producer for you and everyone in the region.

Find out how to use this setting and understand the tradeoffs: Frequently Asked Support Questions of May 17.