Phoenix Maintenance Update 1.5.2.1185

Keeping to our promise of maintaining and continuing to release Phoenix updates we offer you Phoenix Viewer 1.5.2.1185. While this is not a major release it does offer some fixes against malicious crashers being used on the grid, lots of other fixes and comes with a cool new feature or two. All new features in this Phoenix release will of course also be present in our next Firestorm Release coming soon!. The change log for this Phoenix update can be found here. We remind you that it is always important to do a clean install, instructions here. 

On another note I wanted to take this opportunity to crush a few misconceptions and rumors that have been going around. While it is true that V1 based viewers are nearing the end of their shelf life, this is not because LL will be 'blocking' them. LL will NOT be blocking Phoenix or other V1 viewers. V1 viewers like Phoenix will not be blocked, rather they will begin to break as LL rolls out new features that these viewers cannot accommodate.

Mesh objects is the beginning of both a bright new future in realism in Second Life, and the end for these viewers. I took some time the other day to navigate around some of the Mesh Sandboxes while on both the LL mesh viewer and Phoenix Viewer, took some snapshot comparisons to demonstrate to you what I mean by "breaking v1 viewers". In the following link you will see on the left hand side what mesh objects look like on a non mesh viewer vs the pictures on the right of the mesh objects as they should display. See the difference here.

As mesh becomes more and more popular, and I'm sure it will.. more and more people will be selling, buying, making and using mesh in their daily sl lives. As the usage increases, the world will look more and more broken for Phoenix and other V1 users. All is not lost! in fact I was very impressed at the realism of mesh and the quality of mesh objects, it's very cool! But with improvement comes change and with change comes growing pains. In the long term though this is a great new era in both viewer development and realism in Second Life. While many don't like the interface in viewer 2, the code itself is far more flexible and robust than V1 offering so many other possibilities.

Firestorm Viewer will support mesh objects very soon as we work to merge up to LL's latest code. There are also one or two Third Party Viewers who are trying to backport mesh capability into the V1 code base and if they succeed that's great! But it's important to remember that mesh is really just the beginning of things to come, great new features, immersion, functionality, etc.. but which won't work on a V1 based viewer. Enjoy Phoenix while you can but we certainly encourage you to try and get used to Firestorm in your spare time. We released a video a few weeks ago showing just how easy it is to make Firestorm more like Phoenix. Have a watch!


Jessica Lyon
Project Manager
Phoenix Viewer Project, Inc

Friend Permissions Bug

There have been more than enough reports from SL users to justify a blog post informing everyone of this new server bug and how to work around it. It was discovered by one of our support people on an RC region and reported to LL on the 9th of July, it was acknowledged by LL on July 12th but by then it was too late to stop the roll out onto the main grid.

The Bug
You can no longer change permissions for your friends while on a viewer which doesn't utilize Web Profiles and whether you are, or are not on a viewer that uses web profiles the friend you are changing permissions for needs to relog after you have set the permissions through their web profile. I am assured by LL that they intend to resolve this issue as soon as possible but at this time they cannot provide a date when the fix will be rolled out. You can read the Jira report about the bug here https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-7104


The Work Around
In the meantime, there is a work around. First, you must open the "Web" profile of the person you wish to change permissions for. This includes Map rights, Modify my objects permissions and Online status permissions.
1. Open the web profile of the person you wish to change permissions for using the following URL in your web browser. http://my.secondlife.com/firstname.lastname. Replace the first name and last name with the persons first and last name. If they do not have a visible last name do http://my.secondlife.com/firstname instead.
2. Once you have their profile open, click on the "ACTIONS" button near the top and to the right, then choose "Permissions" from the sub menu.
3. Give or remove the permissions you wish to change and click "Save".
4. Now the person you've changed the permission for will need to relog in order for them to actually get the permission change.

OR

If you just want to remove all permissions for a friend to default, you can just remove them from your friend list and re add them.

I hope this helps folks at least understand the bug and how to work around it. Lets hope LL can get the fix out soon!

Jessica Lyon
The Phoenix Viewer Project

Update: Current State of Affairs

Yesterday we received word from LL that Firestorm has surpassed LL V1.23 viewer usage both in time spent as well as distinct users. This moves Firestorm Viewer into 3rd place on the Second Life grid by way of usage. In just a few short weeks since our first beta, Firestorm has become a huge success almost over night. Yet we have only just begun to scratch the surface of what we have planned for Firestorm. We are looking forward to the enormous amount of work ahead of us and the challenges they pose. Lots more interface improvements, feature ports from Phoenix and many more brand new features! Of course we will always be improving stability and stomping out bugs as we progress too. All in all, Firestorm has gone from nothing to something big in a very short period of time. Of this we are very proud and thank our users for being patient as we push through to greater things with each release.

However, while Firestorm can be made to resemble the Phoenix viewer relatively easily... Phoenix it is not, nor is it V1. Firestorm is a new viewer based on the LL v2 code base, and is still in it's infancy in relation to what we have planned. Sadly, I've been hearing a lot of complaints both from our users and our staff of instances where users are being abusive towards our support staff because they do not like one of our viewers or the directions we are going. 

Currently, we have 54 members on our team, broken down that's 16 developers and 38 support members providing you with support in 8 different languages. It may be unknown to some of you that each and every one of us on this team do what we do on a purely volunteer basis. None of us get paid a cent for the work we do, so I would ask that you, who are provided with not just one but two fully functional viewers at no cost to yourselves to please try to respect our staff. I'm happy to say though that the unhappy folks are only a small minority, however they can be very vocal, loud and discouraging.

We are happy to accept and even encourage constructive criticism about the work that we do. But there are better channels to direct your constructive criticism through than our support groups. Our support personnel do not develop the viewers you are using, they are there to help you solve your problems. If you have constructive criticism please direct it at our Developers either through private IM's or via Email. This way our support group channels are left to fulfill their intended purposes, providing support.

You can contact any one of our developers either through IM's in world or Email. Our in world names are listed on our About Us Page, and our emails are firstname.lastname@phoenixviewer.com. Or you can send email to Admin@phoenixviewer.com to be read by our Lead Developers. Or, if you have a feature request, feature improvement or a bug to report please feel free to file it on our Jira. All reports are seen by our developers and none are ignored. If you're not sure how to file a Jira, no problem! We have a wiki page for that! If we are ultimately unable to help you resolve your complaints there are always other alternative viewers available for you to use. You can find a list of the approved viewers here.

We are very excited by the way things are going with Firestorm and this excitement is what will continue to drive us into providing you with a better SL experience.

But do be patient! We've only just begun!

Sincerely,

Jessica Lyon
Project Manager
The Phoenix Viewer Project, Inc

Firestorm Beta 2 with build tools!

As many of you have heard, V1 viewers including Phoenix will soon become broken and mostly unusable on the SL grid as LL begins to turn off server side functionality these viewers require. Fortunately there is Firestorm, our V2 based Viewer designed to be more user friendly for V1 users. Even more fortunate is that you currently have two choices, you can still use Phoenix for important things but we highly encourage you to try to get used to Firestorm in your spare time. This way when V1 and Phoenix becomes broken you'll already have the knowledge and experience to switch to Firestorm full time without growing pains or interruptions in your daily SL activities. While Firestorm has been specifically designed to not interfere with any other viewers on your computer, older Firestorm installations may interfere with new Firestorm releases. If you have already installed a previous Firestorm version we highly urge you to do a clean install for each Firestorm Release Instructions here.

A few weeks ago we released our first public beta of the Firestorm viewer, it was widely received with great delight by a huge number of users. Those who did have problems adopting it however, quickly discovered that following our Migration guide on the wiki and our Tutorial Videos helped resolve most all of their interface orientation issues. However there was one major feature missing from Firestorm Public Beta that was a blocker for a great many users, that feature was the beloved in-world content creation tools for builders, most commonly known as "Build Tools".

Announcing Firestorm Beta 2, WITH  Phoenix Build tools! You now have build options like object face numbers, link numbers, additional decimals for accurate positioning,  copy/paste options for object parameters, additional object types, even the ability to resize the build floater and much more! We've also added many other highly requested features like Quick Prefs option in the bottom bar, V1 style Group Profiles, Starlight Skin Updates/improvements, Griefer protection from animation permission grabbers, seller protection from within the build floater, UI improvements in world map, seconds in chat history just to name a few. But not just features! we've also fixed a huge number of bugs and made improvements to things like Bridge creation, Pie menu, user interface, crash fixes etc. Change Log can be found here.

Please feel free to attend our Firestorm classes which began last week and will continue on a regular basis. You can see our class schedule here . Also remember we offer 24/7 support for both Phoenix and Firestorm viewers in our support groups listed on our Support page. Beyond that you'll find answers to virtually all your questions about "Where is..", "How do I.." on our Firestorm Wiki. Or if you're in the Firestorm viewer, you can quickly get to our wiki by pressing F1 or from the help menu.

We are very excited about the release of this Public Beta 2 and hope you will enjoy it to it's fullest.

Sincerely,

The Phoenix Viewer Project Team

Survey Results

The results from the survey are in and links to the raw data are provided below. The results are anonymous, unedited, unchanged and come directly from www.surveymonkey.com who hosted the poll.  It is important to remember that the survey results do not necessarily form our decision to add or remove these features. As was mentioned in the previous blog these results are there to help us with our decision process, and they are doing just that.

One of the most important reasons we did this survey was to raise awareness of the pro's and cons of each feature listed. You may have noticed that each of the 5 items were worded very carefully so as to demonstrate to you that giving you this ability, takes away from you or someone else an ability. Giving you a freedom, takes away from you or someone else a freedom. While these items are in fact already in the Phoenix viewer, they are legacy features that were created before our team took over from emerald. Back in the day there was much debate over many of these which went mostly ignored by the Emerald team. We are bringing these items back up so we can do a proper public discussion, better explain the positives and negatives of each and perhaps close the door on some of them. This survey gave each of you a public venue in which to express your feelings about each item. This isn’t meant to create drama, but rather create a positive and productive open discussion.

Today we discussed the results of the survey, and had a discussion about the features in question at our Office Hour. For those of you who missed it, we highly encourage you to watch the Office Hour recording here. (We had some sound problems, please index in to 6 minutes and 45 seconds). We are still in discussion internally as well, taking the poll results into account we will soon make solid decisions on each of these items. However we're pretty sure how we are going to go on some of them. This is also discussed in the office hour.


We're providing the poll results in several formats. Here they are.
Web page (recommended)
PDF (doesn't include custom comment results)
Spreadsheet download (a bit hard to read).

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.