Phoenix – Page 5 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Phoenix to Firestorm Viewer Tutorial

2011/08/06 by Nalates Urriah

One of the impressive things about the Phoenix-Firestorm (PH/FS) team is the documentation they are creating for their viewers. From what I see being asked in the PH/FS group and SL Forum I suspect many PH/FS users are unaware of the documentation to be found in the team’s PH/FS Wiki.

Phoenix to Firestorm Migration

I suspect one of the most over looked yet useful articles in the PH/FS Wiki is the Migration Guide. The article is short, by my thinking, just 750 words. It does link to a YouTube video: V1’ify Your Firestorm Experience! The video runs about 12 minutes.

[youtube 3y4PH0rczJQ]

The underlying theme in the Migration Guide is to tweak the Version 2 viewer Interface to be more like the Version 1 Viewer Interface. Having this flexibility built into Firestorm allows for a more pleasant migration experience.

Phoenix Viewer 1.5.2.1185 Released Review

2011/08/02 by Nalates Urriah

Today (8/2) the Firestorm-Phoenix team released a new version of the Phoenix Viewer. The announcement says a new griefer-crasher fix has been added along with several bug fixes. The full list is in the release notes. I’ll cover the ones I find interesting.

Phoenix Viewer Download and Release Notes

Blocking Phoenix

The rumor persists that Linden Lab will block Series 1 viewers. It doesn’t seem to matter how often the Lab says they won’t. Some rumors say all V1 viewers will be blocked. In general those rumors come from people misunderstanding what has been said and what will happen.

ViewerIterationAug11 — Rate of Change Continues to Climb

Most Series 1 or alternately labeled V1 viewers will never render mesh. The changes needed to a V1 viewer to accommodate the mesh render pipeline are massive and complex. It is easier to just start over with V2 code and add V1 features. Adding V2 features to a V1 viewer require extensive rewriting and are time consuming, which is why we see the V1 viewers fallen farther and farther behind the V2 versions.

Phoenix Hour Summary

2011/07/16 by Nalates Urriah

Shug Maitland asked me about a subject that came up in the Phoenix Hour. I’ve been busy with RL this week and not keeping up as much as usual. I had no clue what I was being asked about. I took the time to see what the New Web Profiles fuss was that came up. Also see: New Second Life Web Profiles on Demo

Video Start

Link to video: July 12 Phoenix Hour

0:00 to 4:36 is about Phaylen’s bake fail.

4:36 – Jessica says Firestorm Beta 2 now has 25,000 users and growing. Jessica says they see lots of new users that have not used Firestorm before. My immediate question is how they know if you have used Firestorm before or not?

5:43 – Firestorm and Phoenix support confusion, people forget to say which viewer they are asking questions about in the support group. Remember to give them a hint when asking questions.

6:50 – Phoenix update, no date for the next release. They do plan to support Phoenix until the grid makes it obsolete. Obsolete being when it fails to render the world correctly and the Lab services it needs go off line. While Linden Lab has said they will not block series 1 viewers, they do not plan to provide the support services they need forever.

Phoenix Viewer 1.5.2.1102 Released Review

2011/05/17 by Nalates Urriah

The new Phoenix version has Enhanced Avatar Physics. This wasn’t planned. It is a bug fix, as odd as that sounds. The problem is that series 1 viewers started having problems rendering avatars wearing the new SL Viewer’s Physics Layers. So, Phoenix Viewer users would see avatars wearing the new layer as a Ruth. Oddly the SLV2 people would see Phoenix users Ruthed too.

The details of the problem are in a JIRA report: VWR-25479

While one does need to upgrade their copy of Phoenix to the latest version, one is not required to use Avatar Physics.

I gather that the Phoenix Team had pretty much moved on to Firestorm. But, suddenly the realization the Phoenix viewer was not going to correctly render the avatars of those using the future Firestorm, Kirsten, Singularity, Dolphin, or any other viewer that used Physics Layers. This was worth a fix.

Phoenix Viewer 1050 Moves to Final Version

2011/04/282011/04/27 by Nalates Urriah

Yesterday, the Phoenix Team announced that the 1050 RC version would become the final 1050 version. No changes are being made. The version worked as is. So, if you have the RC, you have the final version. But, if you have had problems, there are some things you need to do.

Read more

Phoenix Viewer Release Candidate 1.5.2.1050

2011/04/21 by Nalates Urriah

No sooner do I see the Kirsten release than up pops a Phoenix Viewer 1050 release. This is another Release Candidate. While the Phoenix team is calling this an RC they say they will provide support for it. So, again the lines between esoteric alpha, beta, RC, and final versions gets fuzzier, at least from my side.

Update – Bug Fix Release

This release is mostly bug fixes and improvements to existing features. The goal was to get a stable viewer. Over the previous part of this year most developers have been getting previous features and new code and features from Linden Lab working. That has lead to crash prone viewers.