Firestorm

Viewer Stability 2013-23

by

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.

Read more

Firestorm Post: 4.4.1 Coming

by

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

by

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.

Firestorm Viewer Fixes

by

The Firestorm team, in spite of running three pass QA, let some problems get through. This just shows how hard it is to catch problems in software. Whatever, the blog now has an article up on the top 3 complaints and their fixes.

Top 3 Complaints & Resolutions for 4.4.0 Release Firestorm Viewer.

The article leads back to Lette’s article, updated, from a few days ago. I covered Lette’s article here: Firestorm Viewer Information.