Today sees the “final” release of Phoenix as a Release Candidate, that brings together the last clutch of major releases from the Phoenix team prior to work starting in earnest on their Viewer-2 hybrid, Firestorm.
Given there are a number of fairly big updates in this release (.725), the Phoenix team are taking a wise course of action in declaring it a Release Candidate that may require some tweaking to iron out remaining issues and bugs before it can be considered a “final” release. Therefore, I’d recommend you bear this in mind when downloading and installing.
The key feature list with this release is impressive, and it is good to see Phoenix get code that officially supports multiple prim attachments, thus finally breaking the issues with using the Emerald hack for this, and there is even a document for those who have routinely used the “Emerald hack” explaining what they’ll likely get on using the RC. Display Names are also introduced with this release, so there are going to be some interesting times ahead for people longing to be able to set suitable role-play names as well! It’s wotrh watching the video on DisplayNames, as Phoenix, I understand, offers additional functionality on these over Viewer 2.x
There are also some changes “missing” from this release (as in, no-one anywhere has yet ported the code for use in 1.23.5-based Viewers), and some changes that are going to doubtless cause confusion and / or minor heart palpitations for those who have not read the supporting documentation. Chief among these are:
- No support for multiple clothing on the same layer: in other words, you cannot wear two Jacket layers, as is possible in Viewer 2.x and its derivatives. Those desiring this are likely going to have to wait for Firestorm or something like Imprudence’s upcoming Kokua Viewer
- Phoenix adopts the Viewer 2.x inventory management code. This means that if anyone has ever used Viewer 2, they could be in for a surprise when they log in with the Phoenix RC and find themselves wearing clothing and one or more prim attachments they were wearing the last time they ever logged into SL using Viewer 2. However, the good news is that Phoenix now has the ability to create Outfit folders at last – although this may not be such a boon to those who manage some of their outfits through #RLV.
The ability to manipulate parcel presets with the same ease as with Viewer 2.x is also a massively-welcome addition to Phoenix.
I’ve run a quick test on various elements – like multi-attach and Outfits creation and the use of Display Names, and all appear to work perfectly well, although I still feel Outfits is limited in that there is no ability to “nest” outfits within a sub-folder structure so that, for example, you could have MY OUTFITS -> GOWNS -> and all your various gown Outfits. Now, this isn’t a fault with Phoenix – it’s the way things work in Viewer 2.x – but perhaps Jessica and the team could look at tweaking the code for Firestorm…
Display Names has a nice work-through, given Phoenix doesn’t have that bloody sidebar, and the functionality is neat.
Overall, this appears to be a mighty swansong for the 1.23.5-based Phoenix (which, once this release hits “final”, will be subject to issue / bug fix releases only), and one that – RC jitters aside – is going to please a lot of people.
Me included! Kudos to the Phoenix team and all associated with the project!
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 