Firestorm Viewer 6.4.21

The Firestorm Viewer version 6.4.21 had been out for a bit now. People are reacting to it. The thread Newest Firestorm version – lag monster popped up 8/4. Which made me curious because that is NOT my impression. So, I went and ran my tests, which I rate at one half-a-posterior.

This version is covered in detail over on Inara’s blog here: Firestorm 6.4.21. I’m not going to repeat what she has already written. I just want to consider what people are experiencing based on what I can see and measure.

My experience is: this version is better.

My Front Porch – 2021-08

The big thing is Firestorm’s viewer now uses multiple threads for decompressing textures. Decompressing is a task that has bottle-necked performance forever. But since it has had little effect on Frames per Second numbers it doesn’t seem to have been a high priority to change. The major effect of texture decompression is in scene render time. I think scene render is much faster. But actually, measuring it well is quite complicated. I suspect most of us hit a region and consider how long it takes for the place to render. A few of us may now and then even time it. Which is practical and simple. Neither is precise and measurements are highly influenced by our location in the region, which way we are looking, our cache – when did we last visit, the region’s construction, and avatar occupancy.

One thing that can affect our perception is this install clears our viewer’s cache of downloaded content. We have to reload EVERYTHING. I think this should only affect your first-time post-install-visits to places you frequent.

A while ago the Firestorm Viewer was upgraded to use the simplified cache developed by the Lab. I think this is the first release of Firestorm that has this upgrade. Beta testers for Firestorm will have had the upgrade for some time.

From the changes the FS Team has made, I would expect this viewer to be faster at rendering a scene. I wouldn’t expect a higher FPS (Frames per Second) rate. I guessed that I might even see FPS dip while textures were decompressed as more CPU cycles would be getting used by the texture processes. That is what I experience… sometimes… There are some oddities happening when one teleports. So, detecting a slowing or a speed-up due to the new multiple threads is tricky.

There are 20 to 30+ Firestorm threads running at anyone time. My four cores are all carrying about the same load but the overall use is about 50%, which is similar to past versions.

Continue reading

Firestorm Updates to 6.4.13

This week Firestorm release an update to their viewer, 6.4.13. For details of what got updated see Inara’s article Firestorm 6.4.13 Release. I am only going to talk about the stuff that interests me.

The Bridge

It seems they made the viewer easier to fix when it comes to the Firestorm Bridge.

My Porch 2021

The bridge is an attachment the viewer puts on your avatar. It provides an interface between in-world scripts and the viewer. Basically, it gives the Firestorm viewer more capabilities. The techy details are here: Firestorm Bridge.

As one bounces between viewers, like I do, one can run into problems. Also, the general flakiness of a connection to a virtual world can cause problems with the bridge. The viewer is smart enough to resolve most problems on its own when something goes wrong with the bridge. But, not all of them. Then it can be a pain to fix the bridge… and often a headache figuring out just what the problem is.

Now there is a BUTTON! Yay! Well… more a menu command than button, but you get the idea. Click Avatar->Avatar Health->Recreate LSL Bridge. Poof the problem bridge is turned into free electrons to evaporate into the valley of lost bits. A new one is generated and attached. Problem should be solved.

This makes it so easy to fix you could add it to your first steps of troubleshooting.

Continue reading