Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The Firestorm Development Team is running a survey on which features are most popular. See their blog post: Firestorm Feature Survey. The actual poll… survey… can be found here: Firestorm Features Survey. The survey ends Tuesday, June 28 at noon.
See the survey results: Firestorm Survey
Firestorm, often called Phoenix-Firestorm, is the series 2 viewer that will replace the Phoenix viewer. The Firestorm team is endeavoring to make Firestorm a transition viewer that series 1 viewer users can use without too much trouble. Also, new users coming from Linden Lab’s viewer won’t be totally lost. Plus the viewer can be customized to be more series 1 or 2 like.
(Download) The Firestorm announcement recommends a clean install of Firestorm and suggests the previous settings file won’t work with the new viewer. Unfortunately the Firestorm uninstall while asking if you want to remove all files, doesn’t. The cache files and folder are deleted. (C:\Users\[user_name]\AppData\Local\Firestorm\). The settings and logs files are left behind. To remove them one needs to delete the files in: C:\Users\[user_name]\AppData\Roaming\Firestorm\.
If you are into saving your chat logs, remember to move them to a safe location before deleting the folder.
Today a new release of the Firestorm Viewer Preview is out. This viewer is alpha, or even pre-alpha, software. So, only attempt using it if you want to experiment and help the Firestorm Development Team. The download link is available through the Firestorm-Phoenix Preview Group. The announcements have warnings one should read, so I’ll not providing a link to the download. If you want the viewer, join the group. If you want to know some things about the viewer and then decide, read on.
The download size is about 26mb. You are warned to uninstall the previous Firestorm Viewer be installing. The Firestorm Viewer uninstall program with the previous version does a good job of removing the install. The cache and cache folder are removed, the program files and folder are removed with the option to preserve any files you may have added, and the skins are removed. You have an option to save (default) your chat logs or remove those too.
I did not have to manually remove any files. The uninstall and new install gave me a working viewer.
Once removed, I installed the new Preview 2 Viewer. I tried running it but got 1.4 FPS on the initial startup. Ugh. Reboot time. After the reboot I get 40 to 67 FPS in my cottage with the default settings from the install. So, do a reboot after you install.
The install changes the default handler for SLURL’s changing it to Firestorm Preview. So, clicking an SLURL in your browser, if you haven’t customized your browser, will call Firestorm. If you want to change your registry to change your default viewer see: Emerald Viewer vs SLURL. Otherwise, just reinstall your favorite viewer. The last viewer installed generally becomes the default handler for SLURL’s
See the latest review: Firestorm Beta 2.5.2 (16922) Release Review
This release is the Preview Release of the Firestorm Viewer. This is still Preview 1. This not a Beta version, it is a preview. It is not intended for daily use. However, something like 1,200 people are using Preview 1 as their daily viewer. So, you may fall in love and over look its flaws. Whatever, this is my first look at the Firestorm Viewer Preview.
A new release of Phoenix Viewer is coming. This is a bug fix type release. There is another Preview of the Firestorm Viewer coming, Preview 2. The recent Phoenix Office Hour on Rezzed.tv covered many of the aspects of the viewers. One important point covered is the future of Profiles, which you REALLY need to read about. My summary of the hour’s content follows.
Not that we ever have any in Second Life… But someone at Linden Lab has apparently talked about adding features from the Firestorm Viewer to the Snowstorm Viewer Project. Some bloggers are saying that means the Phoenix/Firestorm team has partnered with Linden Lab. That sort of implies a paper agreement. Jessica Lyon in the recent Phoenix Hour show says there is no formal partnership, no signed agreements. They are sharing code and features. After all that is the purpose of open source.
You can see a YouTube video that previews the coming Firestorm Viewer. If you don’t know, Firestorm is the next generation Phoenix Viewer based on series 2 code. The video shows how to work with the new Firestorm Viewer user interface. The video lasts 15 minutes.
[youtube 8MInIyHH0mU]
In world there is a Phoenix-Firestorm Group. JOIN