Firestorm Beta 3 with Mesh Support!

Due to popular demand we’ve decided we can't hold back the Firestorm with Mesh support release, however this hasn’t been an easy decision. Unfortunately LL Mesh code comes with a lot of new bugs and undesirable behaviors which we honestly aren’t comfortable releasing with. Many of these issues we would consider blockers for a release. The issues which we wouldn’t consider blockers simply do not reach our expectations for a quality release. However, you asked for it! And you’re getting it in its current state!

For a list of LL Bugs effecting this Firestorm release, please see:

http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/doku.php?id=hot_ll_jira_issues

When you first log into this Firestorm release you will note a few things. First, your settings ‘should’ get reset automatically and your cache will be cleared. This is a must for this release because so much has changed that if you didn’t get settings and cache cleared you WILL have loads of problems. You must also ensure you install this to an empty directory on your computer and not over an existing installation. 

Also, please be patient during your first login on this version as performance will be significantly degraded while your inventory and texture cache gets populated. We suggest just standing around for a few minutes while this occurs. The best way to know when it's complete is to open your inventory and watch the numbers at the bottom. These represent how many inventory items you have loaded. When they stop, your inventory has completed the fetch and your ready to enjoy Firestorm with Mesh support.

We had hoped that this would be our official release and we would by now have reached our feature goals for the “Official release”. However, fate has stepped in the way. Since the release of our Beta 2 we have had a large number of our developer team going on vacations IRL, and thus slowing down the development process, (Though I think they all earned it). Also, many features have had to take a back seat to mesh for obvious reasons; things like Spell Check simply couldn’t be completed in time. The good news though is that this is not our official release and we still have plans to reach our official release feature goals soon!

The better news is that we have achieved many of our release features already. Here’s a summary of some of the new features in this Firestorm release besides the Mesh, improved shadows, Depth of Field and other things we adopted from LL.

Default interface choices from login page. Phoenix/V2/Hybrid

Custom Colored name tags and more

Contact sets - see following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3zA24-Bi-U

Phoenix style contacts/Friend list

LGG Selection beam particle effects

Build in Flight assist with Bridge!

Script count!

Auto Correct

Font options!

New starlight skins

V1 similar volume controls so you don’t have to go into prefs

Volume sliders in the local speakers panel

Ability to fully disable your camera target hints

Improved Camera floater

Greater OpenSim Support

Calc and CAO from command line

Z-Offset is fixed, for changing the height offset of your avatar.

Updated RLVa

Ability to automatically undock side bar tabs

Group IM’s in nearby chat & Console

Italicized Emotes

and more!

Remember to take advantage of our wiki where we host loads of information about Firestorm and Phoenix Viewers.

Jessica Lyon

Phoenix Viewer Project

Phoenix Project Birthday Speeches

For those of you who couldn't make it to our Birthday Bash you can watch/listen to the two speeches by Jessica Lyon and Arrehn Oberlander here.

http://metamixtv.com/shows/the-phoenix-hour/phoenix-viewer-project-1-year-anniversary/


Happy Birthday Firebirds!

Happy Birthday Phoenix Project!

Yes..Today is our birthday! 

Exactly one year ago today this blog post  

http://jessicalyons.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/from-the-ashes 

spread around the grid like wildfire. It was the birth of the Phoenix Viewer Project. 

Today, at noon SLT we will be celebrating with a very big party. Our developers and support staff will be on hand to talk to, mingle with and ask questions. We’ll also have a live DJ and a speech or two. Unfortunately it’s only one region and if I post the location on this blog.. we’ll be overwhelmed and likely crash the sim a time or ten. So at approximately 11:45 am SLT today I will be sending a group notice out to our main Support group. If you would like to attend, be in that group :) . For those who cannot attend, I will post my speech on this blog after the party and any other speeches made from other team members. 

Hope to see you there!

Jessica Lyon

Project Manager

Phoenix Viewer Project, Inc

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