The production release of the Firestorm Viewer is here. It has taken 15 months from the preview to this production viewer. The team has essentially combined the features from the Phoenix Viewer with the new Linden Lab Viewer and technology while giving it a custom user interface.
Significant portions of the Lab’s technology have been changing while the team was working. The team had a changing foundation to deal with as they built. For now, the team feels they have caught up with the Lab. Check it out. The following is what I found.
New Firestorm Splash Screen
In February of this year we saw the first previews of the Firestorm viewer in a video, see: Firestorm Viewer Preview, and a preview version of the viewer. Since then releases of the Firestorm Viewer have been few and far between. I think that phase of Firestorm’s development is over. I expect to see the release cycle speed up.
We are promised another release of Phoenix. I doubt we will see any more development in Phoenix once it gets mesh. Once that release is out we will see all of the team’s effort placed into Firestorm. There will probably be some bug fixes on Phoenix, but Firestorm is the replacement for Phoenix.
Linden Lab has been making a number of changes to viewer graphics. Many of them have made it into this release. But, the team decided to make another release (3.2.1.24179) without all the new fixes. So, if you have problems with FS 3.2.2 download and try FS 3.2.1.
A new Phoenix Hour meeting was last week. I’ve indexed the video below. You’ll see indexing after the summary. You can find the video here: Phoenix Hour Oct. 18, 2011.
Summary
There is not much new information this week. I decided to condense it down to quick summary.
Both Firestorm and Phoenix are waiting on Linden Lab fixes to problems in the V3 code. That means we do not know when we will see the next release of either. Last week several adoption blockers were discussed. Most of those are now taken care of, so the next release probably won’t be a beta.
Also, the next release of both viewers will have mesh rendering. Firestorm almost has a working mesh upload. They will also include a right click feature to have the selected texture download from the server. This is for those things that just simply won’t rez.
You can find the latest Phoenix Hour video here: Phoenix Hour. The following is my summary of the Hour. There are several interesting items disclosed in the meeting. But, there are no ETA’s on FS (Firestorm) or PH (Phoenix) release dates. There is one BIG PROBLEM looking ahead, see 53:00.
01:00 – 1 year of Phoenix Hour Shows
02:00 – LL server upgrades – No one had any clue what they were talking about. You can skip this section. See the Server News here. In the menu click The Stuff -> SL Server Related.
04:00 – Fake support groups. A number of fake support groups with rather rude and abusive support people pose as Phoenix support groups. This is resulting in complaint coming into the Phoenix Team.
One can tell if the group is a ‘real’ Phoenix support group. Look in the member list for Jessica Lyon or Ed Merryman. If a group is a real Phoenix group, it will have one or both of these names as the group owners. Use the fake groups at your own risk.
01:30 – Introductions end. Vacations for the Firestorm-Phoenix (FS/PH) Team are over now that holidays are past. So, work should progress faster.
02:00 – FS has some render problems. The problems are in the Linden code. Once the Lab fixes their GPU problems the team plans a new FS release ASAP. In the mean time effort are under way for Windlight problem. Windlight settings are reverting to defaults on teleport and relog. The contacts list has been displaying two columns of names, display and login. That is a bug. Spell check will be in the next release.
03:15 – The Inventory panel has a really annoying problem. You see it when working in the inventory panel/window. The list suddenly jumps to the top entry. The team has set that as a high priority and hopes to have it fixed in the next release. Hope is the keyword.
