Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Now Open: Second Life’s Firestorm Support Island by Firestorm/Phoenix – Click to visit.
Today is the official opening of the Firestorm Island. See: Firestorm Support Island Opening for more pictures and information. For information from an interview with Jessica Lyon see Inara Pey’s article: Helping the community: the Phoenix Firestorm Support region.
Update: Opening Speech.
I received an announcement today that the Firestorm/Phoenix Team has created a support island that will be opening on August 25th. The island is for use of the SL community. The team is encouraging RHN, White Tiger Mentors, Mental Mentors and others to use the island for training and support. I get that other support groups are welcome too.
Update 8/25 – Now Open: Second Life’s Firestorm Support Island by Firestorm/Phoenix
Update 7/2017 – Photobucket has disallowed use of their hosted images on 3rd party sites unless I pay them. Images are here.
Obviously the island is designed to assist new Firestorm users and for the team’s support crew.
The island has a landing point that starts new users on an educational path, a literal path as you can see in the images. It is designed for those using the Firestorm Viewer. So, people using other viewer may be a bit confused by the images of what to click. But, confusing new users by showing multiple user interfaces might be worse.
Today the Third Party Viewer List was updated and the new Firestorm Viewer release has moved to the top of the list, being the most stable viewer in use, congratulation FS/PH Team.
Dolphin Viewer 3 follows Firestorm and is ahead of Imprudence.
I have yet to crash while using Firestorm… There are other minor annoyances, but crashing is not one of them.
More Phoenix users are changing to Firestorm. There are no numbers out on how many or how fast. They are rather secretive about those numbers.
This week the main grid is getting new software. The Lindens have decided the Advanced Creator Tools will be rolled out to the main channel. The Advanced Tools are also known as Experience Tools. These are the functions that were used to build Linden Realms.
I’ve gotten to use the new Firestorm viewer for a bit. I like the Firestorm default mode and have only been using that mode. It is nice. It is close enough to the Linden V3 interface I can find most things easily.
It has the debug settings for CameraOffsetRearView and FocusOffsetRearView, which I change on all my viewers to give a better camera position. See Camera Position Tips for more on that.
The performance of the viewer is faster than Linden viewers. I turned off Sun/Moon Shadows to get the skin color adjusted in my new N-Core Eloise ‘One Voice’ shoes. My FPS was hitting 40 in my apartment. Nice. My Core2 Quad and nVidia 560Ti are not as fast as I had hoped. But, this version of Firestorm is faster than the last.
I got home late tonight, Wednesday. I see there is a new release of Firestorm Viewer out, version: 4.1.1 (28744). This viewer has been a work in progress for about four months. So, lots of new stuff.
Get the download here: Firestorm-Phoenix Viewer Download.
You can read the official announcement on the FS/PH Blog: Major Firestorm Viewer Update! It has a list of the more interesting updates and new features. A full list of changes, fixes, and features is in the Firestorm 4.1.1 Release notes.
Inara Pey has a more detailed review on her site: Firestorm 4.1.1.28744. Her review hits some of what she sees as the import changes. One being this viewer is more stable than the previous version, which is good.
We have some news from the Firestorm Viewer Development Team today. Seems they have been suffering from burnout for a time. So, they have taken some time off and are now back.
It seems they have some new developers. Holy Gavenkrantz has apparently been a code contributor to Phoenix and Firestorm for some time. Now he is officially on the development team.
Armin Weatherwax was a lead developer for KoKua viewer. For whatever reason he has moved over to the Firestorm team and will be handling development of Firestorm for other grids, like OSGrid.
You may remember there is a thing floating round not so officially called the Havok Licensing thing. That is about Pathfinding, which if you don’t know is about creating Artificial Intelligence Characters or NPC’s (Non-Character Player) and your hopelessly uninformed, which I don’t understand if your are reading this.