I heard there is a new Phoenix Hour out. I suppose someday it will change to a Firestorm Hour. At about the same time the Phoenix Hours restart the next release of Firestorm is released.

This release has a load of features. As best I can tell all the Phoenix features have made it over to Firestorm.  In addition to those features new ones have been added. A good example is the Particle Editor. The code for the Particle Editor was written by Zi Ree. I understand it was written for Firestorm and shared with the community. I first saw the editor in Dolphin Viewer-3 in mid December last year. It has been popping up in other TPV’s ever since.

Particle Editor

Finding the Particle Editor is a bit trick. It is not part of the standard build panel as I expected it would be. After all one is editing a prim’s attributes, so it seems to me that is where it would be. The number of controls in the panel would be difficult to put in a build panel tab.

The Particle Editor

To use the Particle Editor create or edit a prim. Then in the top menu open Build -> Objects -> Edit Particles. Not overly intuitive. It would seem a button in the Build panel to open the editor would be more intuitive. The Features tab seems like an obvious place to put a button.

If you read the announcement of the Firestorm-Phoenix (FS-PH) Q & A, you know there was a reason for having the secession. Jessica Lyon, the voice for the FS-PH Team, said the reason was anger and frustration in the community. So, what is the anger and frustration about and where is it coming from?

You probably know Third Party Viewers (TPV) developers are leaving, KirstenLee and Kirstens Viewer, and new ones are appearing, Cinder and Milkshake Viewer. We also know Linden Lab is advancing their viewer at a blistering pace. In general we see things moving forward and new technology is adopted. A Neilson report shows that Second Life has almost doubled market share (New World Notes) in the last few months.

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The Firestorm-Phoenix team is going to have a Question and Answer secession this Saturday. The announcement is on the Phoenix blog.

Firestorm Release

The meeting is at 1 PM SLT in three regions; Rockcliffe I, Rockcliffe Library, and Agile 3D. Arrive early and divide up by name:

• A-I in Rockcliffe I
• J-R in Rockcliffe Library
• S-Z in Agile 3D

Bring your questions about the viewers and their future.

If you can’t make it, they will have a video available later.

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.

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The Firestorm-Phoenix team has released a production version of the Firestorm Viewer.

Download Firestorm 3.2.2.24336

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.

Download Firestorm 3.2.1.24179

I’ll be trying the viewer Monday. Once I’ve had some time to play with it I’ll write a review.

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.

A new Phoenix Hour has come and gone. Here is my index of the video.

The video is here: The Phoenix Hour – Sept. 20, 2011

Phoenix Hour

00:00 is zero minutes and seconds.

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.