Tuesday 14 June 2011

Firestorm Public Beta has arrived!


That's right! It's finally here, and while we’re calling it a beta it could easily pass as an official release! We certainly feel it's ready for broad public usage. This public beta has demonstrated itself to be very stable in testing and comes with heaps more features than our Preview 2 did. We've also designed it specifically to not interfere with other viewer installations on your system so you can feel confident in giving it a try without any worries.

First, what is the Phoenix-Firestorm Viewer all about? Firestorm is the next generation viewer produced by us; it is based off of Linden Lab’s V2 code base but with a focus on making it V1 familiar. It’s focus is to provide you with a smaller learning curve and an easier transition from V1 to V2. However, while that has been our focus it is important to mention that it still does have a learning curve, it is not exactly the same as V1 or the Phoenix Viewer. Because of this we have gone to great lengths to provide you with tutorial videos and extensive documentation which we HIGHLY encourage you to have a look at. It will take some getting used to, but if you give it a chance you’ll find it will quickly feel very comfortable for full time use.
You can see our tutorial video’s here
You can find our support and usage documentation here 
We'll be hosting Firestorm Classes starting in the next week or two, keep an eye on our classes wiki for schedule

Firestorm Public Beta comes with a huge list of features far beyond what the standard V2 viewer provides. Some of the most prominent features you will notice is that we made you a new PIE’ menu! We’ve provided you with nearly fully functional Radar, a newly written, secure bridge which extends the abilities of the viewer into in world interactivity, like the ability to double click teleport in regions that have landing points, improved radar accuracy and much more to come. We have big plans for bridge in the future. There is a brand new written from scratch built in AO which just works every time and couldn’t be easier to use. Plus many more features you’re used to from the Phoenix viewer. There are however a few features we are hesitant to add because of their controversial nature like True online status in profiles, friendship dissolved messages, who's removed you from seeing their online status etc. In the coming days we will be making another blog post here with a link to a poll. We want to know what you think we should do with these features. But for now, a complete list of features can be found here.

But perhaps most important of all is the UI changes and customization options we’ve provided you. Close to V1, almost everything can now be customized to your liking. Undocking/docking windows, closing them/reopening them, moving them, resizing them or just eliminating them from your view forever are all things you can do with this new viewer.  We’ve provided you with various skins as well, from V1 looking skins to skins that look just like the original V2. Options! It’s all up to you.

Thousands of man hours have gone into this viewer so far, and there is yet still so much more on our planning board to do. So many more features and options we want to bring over from Phoenix and many of our own unique features we plan to create. As with any viewer, this is a continual work in progress viewer, it is in perpetual motion. With each release we promise to have more and more features, options and bug fixes in place. We only wish we could do everything at once, faster! Speaking of doing it faster!...

Firestorm is a community project, what that means is that we very much welcome people from outside our team to help us make it better. Our primary goal is to improve the user experience, there are no egos involved here. We’ve already accepted a lot of code from people who are not on our team and highly encourage anyone to become a contributor to this very promising viewer project. If you contribute enough we’ll be happy to make you a member of the team! In fact several of our best developers started out as contributors themselves. Contributing is easy if you can code!
You can grab our source code from http://hg.phoenixviewer.com/phoenix-firestorm-lgpl/ . Have a peek through our JIRA to find things that interest you. Contribute by providing us patches but please remember all code must be LGPL. You will be properly credited for any and all contributions. Our support members are not developers and may not be able to help you with compile issues, if you need help with compiling or coding feel free to contact one of our developers. Their names can be found here or Email us at dev at phoenixviewer dot  com

Support
It is important to note that while we are providing support for this release, our support people aren’t much more experienced with Firestorm than you are and may have trouble finding you solutions to difficult problems for the first little while. This is a transition for all of us. Also that half of our support team will still be running the Phoenix viewer so they can continue to support Phoenix and may not be able to help with Firestorm issues in this case. Please understand that our support team, just like all of us, work on a volunteer basis. While they are not required to help you, they try their best all of the time and do a fantastic job. Please don’t be abusive towards them. Before contacting support please have a look at our Firestorm wiki first, chances are you will find your answers there faster. If you don't find your answers you can reach support either by IM directly, or through one of our official support groups. Members and groups can be found from our Support page on this website.

With this Phoenix-Firestorm Public Beta comes a new future and direction for The Phoenix Viewer Project which we are very excited about! At some point in the near future the Phoenix Viewer along with all other V1 viewers will begin to stop working as LL starts turning off server side support for them. While Firestorm is optional right now, we must all accept that we will need to transition over to a V2 based viewer at some point soon. Beyond Firestorm there are other options as well, many other Third Party Viewer Projects have started their own V2 based viewers, some have been established for some time already. We encourage you to give them a try as well. 

You can download firestorm from our downloads page.

Note: If you've previously installed any of the Firestorm Preview Builds that you perform a full clean installation for this public beta. Much has changed since preview 2 and you will likely get settings corruption if you don't. Instructions can be found here

We are looking forward to providing you with progressively better versions with each release, and are really looking forward to seeing you on the new Phoenix-Firestorm Viewer! See you in world!

Sincerely, 
The Phoenix Viewer Project, Inc.

56 comments:

  1. To all the Devs:
    Thankyou so very much for all your hard work (and I'm sure it HAS been hard work) in getting this silk purse from the Sow's Ear of Linden Lab's V2. As soon as I can, and as soon as i've read and watched all your preparation, I will enter the Firestorm world.

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  2. Pie menu in Firestorm after all?

    Here, have ALL my internets.

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  3. So far this is exactly what I was hoping for. A sensible mix of v1 and 2. I'm diggin' on it! WTG Jess and Krewe!

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  4. Arrived the same day as duke nukem forever. :o

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  5. Absolutely fantastic job. I love it!
    I am now using Firestorm as my everyday viewer.
    Great work peeps!

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  6. Missing a few things, but I assume those are to be added later (ability to copy and paste object positions as a complete set, ditto for size, restore to last position and the like). I already know which way I am voting on the online status issue: I'm all for putting it in.

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  7. Loving it! Having to second the pie menu -- the lack of it killed V2 outright for me. I'm missing my persistent de-render/ability to load black lists and I'm not sure where "Stop Animating My Avatar" has gone to in Firestorm, but I have faith that you guys are listening and will iron out the rough spots -- something I wish LL would actually do with their V2. THANK YOU!!!

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  9. Love it, but with this critical caveat. Why keep the Show Selection Outlines checkbox off of the build palettes and on that drop down submenu as LL did? I'll assume it's something you can't change hoping the answer is different.

    As much as I like what I see I'll be sticking to v1.23. As a builder it's just too huge an inefficency having to navigate away to some obscure submenu for such a frequently used feature. Tell me this can be fixed someone, anyone :\

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  10. Love it, has everything fixed i hated about v2 - i might actually last more than 5 mins on this one... Just one request please please add ...cam to...its most usful when you have a shop

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  11. Liking the viewer so far, but if I could give a couple visual suggestions to make it easier on the eye, and a bit more phoenix like? My main one is the scrolling chat that fades away. If it could be more like phoenix, in where it's text on a black translucent box instead of separate lines, it'd be a lot easier to read... and i wish we could have text labels for buttons instead of icons, or the ability to change either or. It's going to take me forever to remember the icons and I think it'd be more newbie friendly too. (It's much easier to direct them to "Bottom right button that says Inventory" instead of "Bottom right, the icon that looks like a suitcase". If you've dealt with newbies and trying to direct them to things- you'd know what i mean. :P )

    Thanks though! Going to use it for a while probably, to get used to it before it's mandatory.

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  12. I have been building and providing Firestorm to my friends for a while now. And I can guarentee it is ready for release. It has proven to run fast and stable and is much more user friendly then LL's v2.

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  13. Overall, I like the new UI, though I think elements of it should be toggle-able, such as the favorites bar. A compact location bar option would also be nice.

    I'm somewhat disturbed by the apparent lack of OTR in Firestorm. Surely chat encryption can't have been one of the features dropped for controversy?

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  14. Forget it Said... "though I think elements of it should be toggle-able, such as the favorites bar."

    They are, try right clicking things, much like any other application when you right click something it gives you options. So right click a spot on the navigation bar up top in a spot where there are no buttons or entry fields.

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  15. Poly: So they are. Weird that I couldn't get that to work earlier.

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  16. Just wondering. Is this viewer ever going to have all the features of phoenix? Little things like the rainbow color pointer, and a few other things, are what keeps me using it.

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  17. When trying to log on for the first time it says log in failed. inventory unavailable. ??

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  18. the bridge is a big rock. smh.
    lol

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  19. OMG, you guys have done a fantastic job - Thank you so much!! I love love love this viewer :)))

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  20. when I try to log in firestorm I get a lot of lag and also stay as a red cloud for a long period of time; any help on how to fix this issue?

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  21. yes, thre are a few glitches left, and not all phoenix features there yet, but guess what - it does not matter. you folks managed to merge 2 worlds in 1 viewer better than LL has thought about it (and even more so never realized it). your viewer is intuitive, easy, has a good bit of the phoenix fun already. not to speak of the high performance and fast rezzing. i have never made friends with 2.0. you made it accessible and so much more fun -

    A W S O M E job :)))

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  22. I like the simple old lay out of the prevues viewer. The new controls are way less user friendly. You put the volume controls on top and the sliding of is not open. If you want to read someones profile you have to click like 20 times for each section. When before you did not have to click a MORE button. RIDICULES> Why would you make something more difficult to use then it was before? NOT AN IMPROVEMENT AT ALL. I AM GOING TO LOOK FIND A DIFFERENT VIEWER. GOODBYE PHOENIX>

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  23. All I have to say is, where the heck is the Linux x64 builds? There's still no working streaming on the 32-bit when running on a 64-bit build of Ubuntu because of the gstreamer issue. It's not 2005; people are using 64-bit systems out there now, and every modern computer has 64-bit capability.

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  24. I run a Mac, and this is an awesome viewer, but I randomly crash and when I do, my laptop restarts. Today I crashed 4 times, and I have only logged in for 2 minutes. Do I need to re-install again?

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  26. In Phoenix under preferences/general
    I could adjust the UI size.

    Where do I find this in Firestorm ?

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  27. Whenever I try to launch it I get nothing. I'm running 32bit ubuntu 11.04

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  28. Two blockers for me (crashes don't count at this step of development): No fullscreen and no option to get rid of that lower bar.

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  29. Looking great so far but I'm wondering if you plan to add the following features,

    1. The z modifier so I'm not in the ground, 2. Sound explorer, useful since I'm security so I can see who's spamming noises, 3. The option to remove all the scripts in an object like phoenix has, I need that to keep my script count down sometimes, and finally 4. The ability to save gestures with outfits, and have them activate/deactivate when you put on and take off an outfit. This is handy because I have certain voice gestures that activate jaw movement when talking with a furry av.

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  30. Oh, and script counting too.

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  31. I like this viewer because it's just what I expected! A V1 & V2 mixed style! But i'm so disappointed by the fact that I have to turn off Enable OpenGL Vertex Buffer objects (thus lowering my FPS) because it's supposed to cause crashes on computers with ATI graphic cards thus crashing Firestorm... but i wonder why is this happening only in Firestorm, since any other viewer works correctly?

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  32. Looks Great..One Crash so far when I went to recent in the Inventory. Also Sidebar should have tabs and make it more useful from one button. Otherwise other than dealing with V2, it seems to be snappier and lighter overall...

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  33. I've answered my own question !

    Adjusting UI size is in debug settings - UI Scale Factor

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  34. Oh, one other item. Open Chat and walking. On Phoenix I could walk and carry on a conversation fairly easily. However now I have to force myself to remember to clcik on lower left talk bar. Or I jump in air and run into people. Sort of a downer for me right now...

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  35. Looking good so far, am liking the customisation abilities I have for a V2.
    Finding it very stable and fast so far, no crashing, and my fps have gone up. slowly figuring out where everything is. Would like to second the comment about building tools, would love to have those copy/paste options for object size/position etc.
    Would also like to have an option for IMs flashing to be continuous until answered. great job overall, making V2 a bit easier to swallow.

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  36. Found a bug with the audio stream, for some reason when i teleport anywhere i can still hear my land stream until i relog. I dont know at what point it sticks but it is pretty annoying - it happens if ive had the land stream on or off.

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  37. Thank you team, it's looking SO good. Not really too much of a learning curve provided you can get some quiet time in a remote corner of SL to have a play. Noticed that, while Ctrl-Alt-P still works for 'phantom' mode (well done), there's now no indication of this in Local Chat or as a popup. But overall, WTG people!!

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  38. I also have the streaming audio and media problem. I can hear the media from the media player a couple houses away. I can not even hear mine or use the audio controls to turn my media on or off. If i click on my media viewer it zooms me in on the viewer that i am hearing a couple houses away. Everything else is fine with the viewer.

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  39. This version fails to load for me. I get the application failed to launch error. :/ So frustrating. I've downloaded every patch, update, etc. And still, I get the same error. x0000id. Anyone know how I can fix this? And also, will a non sse2 version be available for those of us with an older computer?

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  40. You will virtually lose every visually impaired person who uses your products with this version. The largest font size and the largest screen size are equal to the smallest sizes o the Phoenix Viewer. The sims that I play have many older folks....meaning...50 and over...with vision problems. I hope you are going to rectify this....or else you will be making it impossible for many to play.

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  41. Nice but can somebody tell me how I get my friendslist in alphabetic order? lmao

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  42. I'm loving it so far! :)

    I have one small thing that I desperately need for me to be able to completely adopt this viewer as my main - you know in Phoenix viewer, down in the right hand bottom corner, there's that little box of sliders for things like LOD and WL setting? I need that in Firestorm. My computers are tiny and I really need to be able to adjust LOD and draw distance on the fly to prevent crashing or lock up due to viewer lag.

    Please and thank you :D

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  43. My only gripe is local chat.
    Even with headers removed its got gaps between lines making it hard to follow, and also gestures look awful.
    Other than that, great job. keep up the good work, and most of all Thanks

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  44. Nice blend of V2 with old Phoenix add-ins. There are a few wrinkles to work out but so far so good. I hope the next update will be to get it built on the 2.7 Development code-base so it works when mesh rolls out later this summer,

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  45. I'm with nexusxmoon on this one.

    I refuse to use anything that remotely resembles v2. If these types are all I'm left with in the future, that will be the time I close down shop and leave.

    Long as a version of the old phoenix lives, I'll be happy. Otherwise, it's been fun, and thanks for all your hard work, but farewell.

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  46. If it had IRC and Growl....I would go for it 100% instead of just part of the time, but I know some things it won't have, and some things will take time, GREAT for a beta.

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  47. @nexusxmoon and Sahara Tyne

    Shut up and grow up. Seriously. You viewer 2 haters are honestly starting to get on my nerves. Firestorm is a great viewer, and if you aren't using it just because it "resembles viewer 2" then GTFO the SL grid. People like you try to hold back every single advancement and change to SL to date, from display names to voice chat.


    Viewer 2 is not the best viewer, but it is not horrible. It is actually useable now, and third party viewers based on viewer 2 will likely be even better. You use phoenix instead of viewer 1. Do you remember how many people said viewer 1 sucked? I do, but now you luddites treat it as the holy grail and want everyone to go backwards because you can't adapt to a new user interface. Technology changes, get used to it.

    To the phoenix-firestorm team, keep up the good work, you have made a great viewer in firestorm, and it will only get better. I am already using it full time

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  48. Hi. So far, I'm really loving it. It does seem stable and a bit faster than Phoenix. There are a few things I can't find... not sure if you've not got to them yet or what. Here they are:

    1 - Inspect - in the Pie menu to inspect an object the other person is wearing.

    2 - s.count in pie menu to get script count of your avatar

    3 - Spell check

    4 - Chat history, in Phoenix, there's a history link when you're in IM with a person that brings up the .txt file with all prior chat info.

    Thanks again!!
    Trinity

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  49. I can't believe how freaking amazing this is. Pie Menu, Radar, AO in client. Land and Estate Tools is normal and easy to get to. The preferences are all awesome and the sidebar is still there but I can avoid it! This is unreal. Viewer 2 might have just become bearable.

    Only thing I notice missing is the draw distance slider on the UI. Otherwise, wow. This is like christmas. I'm freaking serious.
    Thank you guys.

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  50. Crashes often, And almost every single time it starts to lag, If you stand still it's okay, Try to move lag lag lag freeze up screen goes black for a moment still frozen then comes back and then very soon after more lag, I would use this but it needs fixing, A lot.

    Also, There is no Radar the so called implemented Radar just opens the minimap xD Really?

    I know I'm complaining but it's a great viewer just needs quite a bit of work even though it claims it could not be a beta. And everyone is getting these problems.

    Thanks for your time and work, I'm looking forwards to an official working release.

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  51. Could you please add a feature to select animations for the built-in AO from a menu instead of just cycling through arrows?, that's pretty useful for sitting on ground.

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  52. Okay...so we are being forced to this regardless of our wish to do so. No cracking on you Phoenix guys...I know Linden is the driving force behind this. If I didn't have so much invested, I would simply walk away. BUT...since I DO have to use it in the near future...are there any additional skins other than the dark, hard to see, skin that I can't seem to escape? Something a little brighter and easier to see/read? My eyes are just having a really hard time with the selections I have in skins thus far. I guess if we must go to Linden's version of the world, I will stick with you guys. But frustration is already high. Tutorials? I don't have the time to invest in re-learning something I already knew. That's where my frustration lies...having to make time to re-learn something that was already down pat!

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  53. Using it atm...and I think its the second coming...no pun intended...I love it I spoke with Jessica when all the testing was being done and asked for the multi-layers...and lo and behold, we have it...I EFFIN LOVE IT...Big Hugs and much appreciation for all the hard work, effort, and creativity to Jess and the ENTIRE Phoenix staff...you guys ROCK !! Woot Woot

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  54. I wish those who are complaining would take the time to recognize that this is still BETA...give it time I'm most confident that all the nuisances which we are used to in the Phoenix viewer will be worked out... but to just bag on it while it's still in its infancy is just Dreck...And if you used V2 and Phoenix, it shouldn't be too hard to use Firestorm...yes there's a period of adjustment, but that's with anything new...stop bagging on it and focus on the positives...IJS IMHO...Geesh

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  56. I just gotta say, firestorm viewer is the best i have tried so far! its really so much better than phoenix, i love your work! the graphic on it is really smooth and the movement on the avatars too! so much better. love you guys <3

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