Tuesday, November 17th saw the release of Firestorm 4.7.5.47975. While not as major in terms of LL features and updates as the August 4.7.3 release, the new version of Firestorm nevertheless brings with it plenty of general fixes and improvements, both via the Lab and the Firestorm team and contributors.
As per my usual MO, what follows is an overview of the release, highlighting some of the more significant / interesting changes, updates and fixes to be found in the release. For full details of all changes, and all due credits to contributors, etc., please refer to the official release notes.
The Usual Before We Begin Notes
For best results when installing this release:
- Backup your settings
- Do a full clean install – also see this video as well
- Restore your settings.
Details of any versions of Firestorm to be blocked as a result of this release will be announced in due course.
Lab Derived Updates
Firestorm 4.7.5 brings the viewer to parity with the Lab’s 3.8.6 code base, and so includes the new Notifications updates and changes to the mesh uploader. These and other key updates from the Lab are listed below.
Notifications Update
The notifications update presents a new floater for managing all your incoming notifications and notices, the result of a feature request to the Lab from Aki Shichiroji. Within this floater, incoming notifications are split between four tabs: System, Transactions, Invitations and Group, with each tab displaying the total number of notices stored within it.
Notices are initially displayed in summary format presenting the title, date of receipt and other immediately relevant data, and can be opened in one of two ways:
- Clicking on a notice directly will open in a new floater (shown below left) – this is a Firestorm-specific feature for the floater
- Clicking on the small downwards arrow to the right of the notice will expand it within the existing floater (show below right).
The floater also includes two buttons: Collapse All and Delete All. Both do as they suggest: collapse all notices open within a tab in the floater and delete all notices with a tab. Two further Firestorm-specific aspects of the notifications floater are:
- An improved display of condensed group notices and show group name instead of sender name
- The floater remembers the last selected tab after a relog.
Mesh Uploader Updates
Firestorm 4.7.5 includes the updated mesh uploader from Linden Lab, as seen in the SL viewer 3.8.4.305119 release.
This feature modifies the mesh importer to (optionally) improve debug output, perform name-based LOD association, and handle models with many materials, and allows models with more than 8 unique faces to be imported. When using it, note that:
- The same limitations on LODs and materials remain in place (e.g. your low LOD mesh materials must be a subset of the full LOD materials).
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LODs and Physics reps can now be explicitly associated with a given mesh in the full LOD model using name-based matching.
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By properly naming the meshes in your lower LOD meshes and physics reps, you can avoid issues with ordering of the meshes within your DCC tool and other material mismatching errors.
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An ImporterDebug option has been added to the settings.xml file which, if enabled, causes more information to be output during import than you can shake a stick at.
The extra output can be very helpful for diagnosing authoring errors (e.g. violating the material subset constraints mentioned above) and pinpoint what needs to be fixed in the source model for successful import.
Further information can be found in the Lab’s Knowledge Base article.
Other Updates from the Lab
Other notable updates from the Lab include, but are not limited to:
- A fix for unable to wear a copy of a wearable until relog or swapping to a wearable with a different UUID (see: BUG-8388 and FIRE-16097)
- A fix for viewer crashing at logout if wearing clothing textured with a local texture (BUG-8872 and FIRE-15787)
- A fix for viewer crashing if you open Help > About while a group member list is loading (see BUG-9396)
- A fix for deleting objects too quickly from contents of another object results in viewer crash (see BUG-9492 and FIRE-16352)
- A fix for alpha masking not working when ALM is enabled if the object has a legacy bump set (see BUG-7263)
- Fixes for mesh models sometimes failing to load completely (see: BUG-6803, BUG-7239, BUG-8806, and FIRE-15690)
- A fix for the inventory count sometimes not displaying (see BUG-7263)
- A fix for group members of large groups in a role which has “Invite people to this group” ability not being able to send group invites (see BUG-9404)
- A for fox errors when texturing a linkset “Unable to add texture. Please wait a few seconds and try again.” (see BUG-9957 and FIRE-16755)
- A fix for the massive slowdown when opening “Place Profile” or “About Land” dialogue when the Covenant text is long
- A fix for broken texture animation on rigged mesh
- A fix for building block type changing to Torus after cancelling changing of texture for sculpted object
- The time remaining is now displayed before the avatar name in the parcel ban list for timed bans
- A huge number of maintenance fixes from various LL Maintenance viewer updates – for the full list, please refer to the Firestorm notes.
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