Firestorm 7.1.11: DeltaFPS: performance updates and tweaks

On Tuesday, October 22nd (SLT), Firestorm released version 7.1.11.76496 of their viewer. The primary aim of this release is to achieve parity with the Lab’s DeltaFPS viewer release, and bring the performance enhancements and fixes from that viewer to Firestorm. Note that the following is not a complete review of the 7.1.11 release and all the changes made therein; it focuses on the more visible and user-facing updates. Those requiring a list of all changes and updates to Firestorm 7.1.11, including all bug fixes and changes since the last release, should refer to the Firestorm 7.1.11 release changelog, which also provides all proper credits for the work.

Table of Contents General Notes Installation On Version Blocking Linden Lab Updates: DeltaFPS Schedule Region Restarts Disable 2K Textures for Bulk Uploads Disable LookAt Animations Notable Bug Fixes General Quality of Life Fixes Notable Viewer Build Updates WebRTC – Reminder Why Make The Change? Benefits and Improvements Limitations Security Additional Information Firestorm Updates AVX2 Update Pie Menu: Object Take Options Camera Roll and Key Bindings Assorted Quality of Life Updates OpenSim Updates Feedback Related Links

General Notes

Installation

• Only download Firestorm from the Firestorm website. Do not utilise and other third-party site purporting to offer the Firestorm viewer, and remember Firestorm will never ask for log-in credentials in order to download a release version of their viewer.
• There is no need to perform a clean install with this release if you do not wish to.
• Do, however, make sure you back-up all your settings safely so you can restore them after installing 7.1.11.

On Version Blocking

The Firestorm Team provide the following on viewer blocking and updating:

• As per the 7.1.10 release documentation, Firestorm 6.6.17 will not be blocked, but will remain available for those who need it. However, it will not be maintained in terms of updates and bug fixes.
• Firestorm 6.6.14 will also remain unblocked for the time being. However users running version 6.6.14 are strongly advised to update to version 6.6.17 on the ground of greater stability.
• Users on the initial Firestorm PBR release, 7.1.9, are strongly encouraged to update to this release – 7.1.11 -in order to benefit from both greater stability and improved performance. Version 7.1.9 may well be blocked in the future, due to the high number of crash reports.

Linden Lab Updates: DeltaFPS

• Viewer version number 7.1.10.10800445603 (release notes).
• Date of promotion to release status: 17th September, 2024.

This is the first of two viewer releases from the Lab specifically targeting performance improvements (both PBR and non-PBR related), and which offers some additional quality of life improvements for users and a range of bug fixes. The following is a summary of some of the more notable updates within the DeltaFPS release:

Schedule Region Restarts

• Region holders / Estate Managers with access to to the Region /Estate floater can now schedule their region restarts to run at a given time.
• Top menu → World → Region Details → Region → Manage Restart Schedule button.

Disable 2K Textures for Bulk Uploads

• Even with the pop-up warning when including 2K textures during a Bulk texture upload, some people are still getting caught out. To further help prevent this, it is now possible to limit all Bulk textures to a maximum of 1024×1024 (thus limiting costs to L$10 per texture uploaded).
• Top menu → Build → Upload → Bulk  → check Scale Textures to a Maximum of 1024px in the upload floater.

Disable LookAt Animations

• Tired of your avatar constantly tracking you mouse pointer movement, and looking like an idiot, constantly look up and down? You can move disable the animation.
• Top menu → Developer → >Avatar → Character → Tests Disable Look At Animation.
• Note this does not disable LookAt data being broadcast by the viewer (the cross-hairs / name tag), it only disables any avatar body / head movements associated with LookAt.

Notable Bug Fixes

• • Issue 1870: Improved performance on lower-end systems: lower-specification systems should see improved viewer performance; particularly those with the following:
    • Intel HD 4000, 4400, & Iris Xe video cards.
    • Nvidia GT 1030.
    • Laptops with an AMD video card.
    • Macs with the M1, M2, or M3 Silicon SoC chips.
  • Issue 2225: Fixed opening the Joystick Configuration floater causing a hug FPS drop.
  • PBR-related fixes:
    • Issue 853: Fixed – PBR Material resets to legacy material after teleport
    • Issue 1299: Fixed – PBR texture stretches when “stretch textures” is unchecked.
    • Issue 1847: Fixed – Negative UV scale causes wrong lighting on PBR materials.
    • Issue 1922: Fixed – Make PBR scale and offset crosshair work the same as Texture crosshair.
    • Issue 1857: Fixed – Reset texture transforms for a terrain PBR material when the material is applied.
    • Issue 2027: Fixed – Being unable to apply PBR materials on larger linksets.

General Quality of Life Improvements:

• Issue 1209: Fixed – Newly-created sculpted prims not rendering until relog.
• Issue 1253: Fixed – Viewer tries to detach attachments in inventory on shutdown.
• Issue 1500: New – Better out of disk space handling: The viewer should no longer crash when disk space is low; instead the user will receive the warning: The system is out of disk space. You will need to free up some space on your computer or clear the cache.
• Issue 1965: Fixed – Selection beam swirls swirl forever when the user interface is hidden
• Issue: 1905: Fixed – The “Share” and “Pay” buttons are active when selecting multiple avatars in Nearby tab.
• Issue 1988: Fixed – The ‘Set Empty’ option (Preferences → Controls does not remove previously applied keys for all control modes with the ‘Apply to all’ checkbox.
• Issue 2144: New – Added tooltip to the region Object Return button to clarify who “someone else” means.
  • Top menu → World → Region Details → Debug → Object Return → Options → On someone else’s land.
  • Tooltip has been changed from “Return only objects which are on land belonging to someone else” to “Return only objects which are on land that isn’t owned by selected user”.
• Issue: 2395: Fixed – Favourite and Featured locations sending user to (0,0).
• Issue 2467: Fixed – Sim surrounds do not fully load.
• Issue 2482: Fixed – Second Life reports incorrect amount of available video memory on some discrete GPUs on Windows.

Notable Viewer Build Updates

• Updated llphysicsextensions to version 1.0.66e6919
• Updated Tracy profiler to version 0.10
• Updated Meshoptimizer package to version 0.21
• Updated llca to version 202407221423.0
• Updated Boost to version 1.85
• Updated Ogg Vorbis to version 1.3.5-1.3.7
• Updated VLC to version 3.0.21
• Updated libhunspell to version 1.7.2-r1
• Updated from jpeglib to libjpeg-turbo 3.0.3

WebRTC – Reminder

Note: as WebRTC is (subject to last-minute stoppers) now due to be deployed across the gird in the very near future, the following is repeated from my 7.1.10 release overview, for the benefit of those who use Voice and who may not have upgraded to Firestorm 7.1.10 / read that overview.

WebRTC communications protocol (RTC=”real-time communication”) is the new Voice communications protocol for Second Life, replacing Vivox Voice.

Why Make The Change?

Voice in Second Life has been supplied through an arrangement with Vivox. This has required Linden Lab to utilise a viewer plug-in tool – SLvoice.exe – to manage voice services within the viewer., which in turn has made LL both reliant on Vivox for bug fixes for the plug-in, and subject to changes in support for operating systems imposed by Vivox such as the latter ending native support for Linux some years ago).

WebRTC by contrast is the predominant telephony protocol used by web-based applications, such as Google Meet, and is integrated into most common browsers. It has almost all the features common to Vivox in supplying a voice service – spatial in-world voice; peer-to-peer sessions; Group voice (including moderation) and multi-user Voice conferencing – although the are some limitations (see below).

Benefits and Improvements

WebRTC Offers a range of benefits over Vivox, including, but not limited to:

• 48khz audio bandwidth providing cleaner sound.
• User control over:
  • Audio noise reduction – high reduction for noisy environments, no reduction for clean audio sources (performers, etc.)
  • Automatic gain control – less need to individually tune other user’s audio levels.
• Audio/video device selection.
• Improved: spatialization,  audio echo cancellation and audio sampling rates for improved audio quality.

Most significantly, WebRTC removes all reliance on a third-party plug-in for the viewer. Instead, it is supplied as a  a library and wrapper within the viewer. This means:

• Linden Lab has greater ability to address Voice related issues directly, without having to await fixes from a supplier.
•  Potentially opening the door to adding features and capabilities to SL Voice in the future, including some which have been long-requested.

Limitations

• WebRTC does not support the existing Voice Morphing capability in Second Life.
  • This is because voice morphs are tied to the Vivox service, and cannot be utilised with WebRTC.
  • Those who do use the current Voice Morphing capability are directed to this SL Wiki article on Voice Morphing, which provides a list of solutions which can be used with WebRTC.
• Conferences and group voice calls are limited to 50 participants.

Security

The Second Life implementation of WebRTC addresses security issues such as potential eavesdropping, exposing users’ IP addresses, etc., by routing communication through proxy servers managed directly by LL .

Additional Information

• Big updates coming to voice services in Second Life – August 2024.
• WebRTC Voice wiki page.
• WebRTC Voice on Second Life, a Developer’s View – Kristy Aurelia.

Firestorm Updates

Performance: AVX2 Update

AVX2 (also known as Haswell New Instructions) is the more recent of the Advanced Vector Extensions for  Intel and AMD, which should offer improved performance for more modern systems. To quote the official blog post on the AVX2 work:

Installer choices – supporting modern CPUs (AVX2): One of our aims is to help those on lower-end machines, and one change that our early-access users have loved has been enabling a feature of modern computer (called AVX2) which can unleash extra performance even on smaller machines. It works on CPUs built in the last decade, but don’t worry if you are not sure, the Firestorm installer will warn you if your computer is too old for this, and will redirect you to a more traditional version (Linux user can check here).  Some have found it makes a massive difference.

Pie Menu: Object Take Options

• Linden Lab recently added further options for picking-up multiple objects collectively selected in-world and returning them to inventory as one of the following:
  • Take As Combined Item: return all the selected objects to inventory as a single, coalesced object (old behaviour).
  • Take Copy As Combined Item: return copies all the selected objects to inventory as a single, coalesced object, leaving the originals in-world as individual objects (old behaviour).
  • Take As Separate Items: return all the selected objects to inventory, but list them as individual items, not as coalesced (new behaviour).
  • Take Copies As Separate Items: return copies all the selected objects to inventory, but list them as individual items, not as coalesced, leaving the originals in-world (new behaviour.
• These options were added to the right-click Context menu in Firestorm 7.1.10 (see: Object Take from my Firestorm 7.1.10 overview).
• Firestorm 7.1.11 now extends this options into the pie menu as well – not that they will only be displayed within the pie menu when selecting multiple objects to return to Inventory at the same time.

Camera Roll and Key Bindings

Camera Roll Added to the Phototools Camera Floater

• Camera Roll was added to Firestorm 7.1.0, in the form of two buttons on the Camera floater which allow the camera to be rolled clockwise or counter-clockwise for more dramatic photos see here for more).
• These buttons have now been added to the Phototools Camera Floater.

Camera Roll Key Bindings

• In addition, Firestorm 7.1.11 adds the ability to create key bindings for the camera roll buttons: Preferences → Controls → When in third person or when sitting → Camera section → Roll left / Roll right.

Assorted Quality of Life Updates

• Addition of a “eye” button on the login splash screens.
  • When clicked, will display the alphanumeric values for a password as it is typed in, rather than black dots.
  • If the password has previously been saved (and so entered automatically on account name selection), clicking the button will display a placeholder, not the password.
  • See: FIRE-34629.
• Pie menu autohide function has been extended to also work with sub menus and not only slices.
• Whitelist adviser text corrected, as per FIRE-34524.
• Snapshot floater updated so that the Current Window option no longer gives any pixel sizing (“512×512”), to reflect the fact that images up to 2K can be captured using this option, potentially incurring additional costs. See FIRE-34562.
• Preferences → Graphics: in order to reduce potential confusion, the setting GPU Dedicated VRAM (GB): (Preferences → Graphics → Hardware Settings) has been renamed to Override GPU Dedicated VRAM (GB):.

OpenSim Updates

• Removed the hardcoded classified fee for OpenSim (see FIRE-34618).
• Fix for a crash when querying glTF materials (see FIRE-34589).
• Fix for an OpenSim crash in surface patch gen Tangents for empty patch (see FIRE-34672).
• General fix for OpenSim viewer build.

Feedback

In the limited time I’ve had to use 7.1.11.76496, I’ve found that it (and earlier versions of the Beta release) provide a decent improvement in performances and better stability. I did find with both 7.1.10 and earlier 7.1.11 Beta versions I experienced multiple crashes during / when attempting teleports. This has not been the case with 7.1.11.76496, although I have been running it less than 24 hours at this point. As with the PBR release, I have no feedback to offer with this release, as I’ve not had time time to bounce around with it to any great degree.