Firestorm Feature Survey

Firestorm Public Beta has been a huge success overall. There has been less confusion than we expected and the general consensus from our users coming from V1, and folks from V2 have been very positive. This is great news as it means we are off to a great start! Our download count is already around 24,000 as I write this, and our initial crash statistics are showing the Firestorm Public beta to be very stable as well, in fact Firestorm currently sits in 4th place on the Third Party Viewer Directory based on crash rate. This may change in time as more people adopt Firestorm but we are very proud of this achievement. Thank you all for giving it a try!

As development of the Firestorm Viewer progresses we are continually adding more and more features, functionality improvements, bug fixes and interface customizations options. The Firestorm viewer is a result of the overall volume of requests, suggestions and opinions we've received from you since the beginning. What we do is a result of what you want and how many of you want it. But we've reached a stage once again where we want your input.

There are a few features in the Phoenix Viewer which have been considered controversial by some in the past.  So we have created a poll ask that you all fill it out as honestly as you can. Please only vote once so we can have an accurate result. The results of this poll will help us in our decision making process as to if and how we implement these features in the future.

The poll will run for exactly one week, ending at at 12pm SLT next Tuesday. At that time we will make the results of the poll public. The Poll can be found here. We do not collect or have access to any personal information about you, not even your IP address. The Poll is entirely anonymous.

Thank you all very much for your participation in helping make Firestorm the best it can be.

The Phoenix Viewer Project, Inc

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.

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.

Phoenix 1.5.2.1050 goes to Official Release!

Phoenix Viewer 1.5.2.1050 is Official!

Yes! Today is a great day! After receiving lots of feedback from our users combined with the crash statistics provided by LL, we are taking 1.5.2.1050 out of Release Candidate and making it an official release! There is nothing new to download, just the title has changed.

According to this week's crash statistics covering last week we've actually made new record for stability in a Third Party Viewer with a 9.88% crash rate!! While we do expect the crash rate will rise slightly as more and more people move to it, we don't expect it to rise very much, lets hope it stays right where it is! As previously mentioned the focus leading up to this release was stability and crash fixes. We investigated, found and fixed a huge amount of crash bugs for this release. But it wasn't all us! Credits and thank you to Imprudence, Singularity, Henri Beauchamp, Linden Lab, Code Contributors from the SL Community and many others for sharing their own crash fixes with us under the spirit of Open Source. 

1.5.2.1050 Troubles?

We haven't based this decision solely on the crash statistics. We also based it on feedback from our users and our Support Team. While most people found 1050 to be fantastic, some did have problems. Fortunately these problems have proven to be solvable with little trouble.

Some of the most common issues were poor performance. If you are having poor performance on 1.5.2.1050, please read the "A Note on Performance" section of the following wiki page:
http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/doku.php?id=change_log_1.5.2.1050

Most people who did have crash or stability issues with 1050 were resolved by performing a clean install. Instructions on how to do a clean install on the following wiki page.
http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/doku.php?id=clean_reinstall

Japan Donation!

We made the donation today to go to Japan Relief! With just a few dollars lost due to transfer fees from LL the final donation was $2277.54!! Way to go people! The reciept can be seen here:
http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/doku.php?id=japandonation

Sincerely,

The Phoenix Viewer Project Team.

Phoenix Viewer Release Candidate 1.5.2.1050

Phoenix Viewer Release Candidate 1.5.2.1050 is now live. Release candidate means that while the release has been thoroughly tested by our Quality Assurance Team and passed, we want to make sure that it is as good as it possibly can be. Your feedback over the next few days on this version will help us determine whether we get to change it to an official release. Although this is a release candidate, it is official and we will be providing support for it.

Where to download?
From our website links on the right -->
or from here:
http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/doku.php?id=downloads
Change log here:
http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/doku.php?id=change_log_1.5.2.1050

Why should you update?
- This build is expected to be our most stable ever, we have fixed dozens and dozens of crash bugs and spent a great many hours on stabilization.
- We have resolved many more sculpt rezzing issues.
- Most importantly... The Client Bridge prim has been updated.

About the Bridge update and why it is so important to update your phoenix viewer to this release.

The client bridge is an object the viewer creates and attaches to your avatar. This prim expands the functionality of the viewer for things like double click Teleports and greater accuracy for positional data of avatars on the built in radar.
The bridge was invented long before Phoenix and was created using a bug which allowed the prim to be 100% invisible. This is not the same as being transparent or made transparent with a texture, it is truly invisible. However if you could see it, you would see a default sized spherical prim attached to your waist.

Linden Lab is fixing the bug which was used to create this invisible prim and this fix will quite possibly cause the prim to render with a plywood texture. Effectively if you don't update, you will be seen wearing a plywood sphere around your waist when this fix is implemented by the Lab.
More info on this fix here: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-6782

We have created a new bridge prim in this release using a very small micro prim, made fully transparent. When you first log into this release, please log into a region where you can build so the viewer can create the new bridge object. Once created the object should go to your Objects folder first, then be automatically moved to the #Phoenix folder in your inventory.


Remember that if you have problems with this release our Support Staff will be standing by to help, but please be patient and understand that they will be very busy over the next while.

Note: RLVa has not been updated due to time constraints.

Enjoy!
The Phoenix Viewer Project, Inc

Gotcha! Happy April fools Day!

Our Phoenix Viewer users have all noticed on logging in today that there is a Neko avatar staring back at them on the login page. This is my avatar, Jessica Lyon,  Project Manager of the Phoenix Project. There has been some concern that the viewer has been hacked, this of course is incorrect. Unfortunately our Legal department email address has been inundated with concerned residents. As some may not realize the login screen is loaded dynamically from the web and can be changed at any time, just as the LL login screen changes almost every time it's loaded. While most of our users got the joke, some were offended by it. I'd just like to point out at this time that there are websites all over the internet participating in jokes on this day including Wikipedia, Google, Microsoft, WoW and many many others.
There's a big list here http://aprilfoolsdayontheweb.com

I apologize if you were offended by the prank, it's all in good fun and tradition!
You can download the 12 different login page images here:
http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/doku.php?id=april_1_textures

On another note.. and this is NOT a joke.. our fund raiser for Japan relief has generated over $1700 US so far thanks to you! Thank you all SO much! It's important to remember that while we may not have much.. we have more than they do right now. Keep those donations coming!

Sincerely,
Jessica Lyon
Project Manager
The Phoenix Viewer Project, Inc

Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Fund

As the entire world knows by now Japan has been devastated with a massive Earthquake, Tsunami and now serious nuclear issues. Many coastal towns have been completely wiped off the face of the earth. It's time to step up and recognize how fortunate we are in comparison and share some of that fortune.

We have decided to hold a fund raiser, 100% of proceeds will go to http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/japan-earthquake-tsunami-relief/ whom will divide the proceeds to various rescue and relief organizations specifically for Japan relief.

We are making a call to action here, please donate Generously! This ChipIn will remain available for 1 month at which time we will make the big donation. You can donate in world to our donation bot named "PhoenixViewerDonations Memo" in world, or from our chipin below.