Monday 16 May 2011

Phoenix Viewer Release 1.5.2.1102

V2 Avatar Physics in Phoenix!?!? o.0

Those of you who attended the May 3rd Phoenix Office Hour might remember me saying "Phoenix will never have V2 Avatar Physics"...well... excuse me while I remove my foot from my mouth...
That was before LL released Avatar Physics which created an incompatibility between V1 viewers and viewers with v2 Av Physics. See below link for reference.
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-25479

The problem is that V1 viewers don't recognize the appearance data sent by viewers with avatar physics. Initially LL offered us a simple fix which we were going to use, until we saw that Shyotl Kuhr had submitted a backport patch of V2 Av Physics into the Singularity Viewer. With permission from and thanks too Siana Gearz of Singularity and some modifications of our own we have ported that patch into this release.

The reason we chose to include av physics is to increase adoption of this release as it fixes a pretty critical issue which affects content; without this release you will not see people on Viewer 2, Singularity, Firestorms next release..this phoenix release or any other viewer with av physics correctly. Because of this I highly encourage you all to update to this release.

Because av physics isn't the easiest thing to set up correctly we have created some documentation pages on how to use and set up av physics in phoenix here:
http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/doku.php?id=phoenix_avatar_physics

We have also created a MarketPlace account where we are giving away a free box of preset av physics layers used by members of the Phoenix Team. In it you will find physics settings used by Jessica Lyon, Miro Collas, Mobius Ryba, Pudenta Magic, Sunset Faulkes, Thea Brianna,Whirly Fizzle's and many others male and female.
https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Phoenix-Team-Physics/2270517
We will also be putting up other useful freebies on this marketplace account related to the Phoenix and Firestorm viewers for our users as well so stay tuned! The store is being run by our PhoenixViewerMascot account but is controlled by Jessica Lyon and Mobius Ryba.

For those of you who do not want Avatar Physics we still encourage you to update so you see others correctly. You can disable seeing avatar physics in (Prefs> Graphics> Av Physics) while still seeing other avatars normally. You can also disable sending your Av Physics data to the server in (Prefs>Phoenix>Avatar> Don't send avatar physics to server).

Avatar Physics isn't the only thing we've done!, we've also fixed an important security issue, some Mac and Linux bugs, Sculpt fixes and much more. See change log here
http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/doku.php?id=1.5.2.1102_change_log

IMPORTANT: If you have problems with this release...
We highly encourage you to uninstall your previous version of Phoenix before installing this one. If you find your still having issues, chances are very high that a "clean reinstall" will fix it 99% of the time. This often happens because of either conflicts or corruption of the settings files.
Instructions on how to do this here:
http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/doku.php?id=clean_reinstall


Enjoy the release!

Sincerely,
Jessica Lyon and The Phoenix Viewer Project Team.