Second Life and Virtual Worlds
There is an announcement on the Firestorm blog about a coming Q&A meeting. See: Wednesday Question and Answer Meeting.
The plan is to have Jessica Lyon moderating and developers available for questions. Everyone is welcome. However… the region will only hold 70 people. It is first come first served.
The meeting will be Wednesday February 13, 2013, at 1:00 PM SLT/PST (or 13:00 military time), which seems a bit ominous with all the 13’s. The location is in the region: Phoenix Firestorm Support.
The Phoenix Team is going to hold an Office Hour… an open meeting in-world and streamed to the web. The meeting in-world will be at the team’s region: Phoenix Firestorm Support. This link lands you at the door to the meeting hall. You can probably figure out that single landing point is going to be stacking avatars like pancakes the day of the meeting. So, here is an alternate: PhFsSupport. It is about 20m east of the official landing point. Turn 180 and you’ll see the building.
The meeting will be Saturday at 1:30 PM SLT or PST… US West Coast time. The team is advising you get there 30 minutes early… Think about this. One region, one landing point, one entrance to the building… attending is going to be a problem.
The meeting will be streamed to the web: Phoenix Stream.
Yay! A new release of the Firestorm Viewer (FS) hit the net last night. You can read the team’s release announcement here: Firestorm Major Release 4.3.1.31155. This is a big release for the Firestorm team. It has lots of new features. Since the SL Viewer released a load of new features the FS team usually feels they can release their implementation of them.
Get your SL downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux here: Firestorm Viewer Download.
For OpenSim use this link: OpenSim Firestorm Viewer Download. More about this later.
The files size for windows is about 40mb. The download is fast, taking only a couple of minutes.
With this and the last several releases the team has recommended a clean install, meaning remove the previous install. That of course wipes out your viewer settings.
On the 14th the Firestorm-Phoenix Team posted on their blog about the release of a beta version viewer. The Large Group Editing changes for the server side have been rolled out on the grid. This roll out creates a bit of a problem, but not really.
Once upon a time using the UDP protocol for Second Life was a good idea. Now that the devices that make up the Internet’s infrastructure are smarter and more HTTP aware the use of UDP for downloading large group member lists is not such a good idea. Also, the way users have decided to use groups has changed from what the Lab initially designed for. So, users are sending much larger data sets across the old UDP protocol used for the Group Member List download.
UDP packets can be lost and there is very little that can be done to recover them. For SL-users that means the user list of large groups often (usually) fails to load.
The new code now limits the list size to 10k or less for all UDP requests. For those using the SL Viewers and several Third Party Viewers (TPV) the limit makes almost no difference as they already had problems trying to edit lists over 10k.
No not a viewer release. Jessica has posted on the Firestorm blog about what is going on with Firestorm and their development effort. See: Status update.
In my Kokua article: Kokua Beta Status & Review, I wrote about the rates that developers were releasing versions of their viewers. Jessica is explaining their release philosophy and how that will be changing.
Included is a list of coming features in the next release. Some we have seen in preliminary versions in other TPV’s. I expect the Firestorm release to have features with more polish and improved user interface.
The Team is also focusing on stability. Firestorm is currently the most stable viewer used with Second Life™. Jessica says they have even more stability fixes.
On August 27 Firestorm 4.2.1 was released followed by an immediate OOPS! There is a problem that Tonya Souther describes as:
It turned out that 4.2.1 has a bug in it that makes most swinging doors not look like they act correctly (though they actually do). They appear to swing normally, then jump ahead, swinging farther all at once.
I’ve seen something similar in the Linden Development Viewers for some weeks now. So, this is probably not a Firestorm bug but something in the Linden Code.