Following the recent release of Firestorm 4.6.7 (see my overview for details), the Firestorm team has announced that Firestorm 4.5.1 will be blocked as from Friday September 12th, 2014.
The blocking of version 4.5.1 – which does not affect any of the more recent releases of Firestorm, is in keeping with the Firestorm team’s agreement with Linden Lab to only allow – as far as possible – only the most recent three releases of Firestorm to connect to Second Life.
Also unaffected by the block, and for the benefit of Mac users, is version 4.4.2 – in keeping with their promise to Mac users, Firestorm will not be blocking version 4.4.2 until such time as more of the Mac-specific bugs which have occurred in more recent SL viewer releases (and inherited by Firestorm and other TPVs) have been dealt with.
However, although the blocking is related to Second Life, please note that this announcement does mean that as from September 12th, Firestorm version 4.5.1 will no longer be able to connect to OpenSim grids as well.
If you want to know why Firestorm block versions, you can find an explanation on their blog. Similarly, if you wish yo know how Firestorm implement a block, you can do so via the Firestorm wiki.
In terms of the upcoming block, those users who are still running 4.5.1 are asked to update to a more recent very of Firestorm sooner rather than later. As the official blog post from the team notes:
If you wait until the last minute to update you will have a harder time reaching support since most people seem to wait until the last minute and then contact support for help.
Over recent months we’ve seen 64-bit versions of some third-party viewers arrive, notably Singularity and Firestorm, both of which are available in Windows and Linux flavours. Their arrival has raised questions both on when we might see a 64-bit version of the official Linden viewer and – more particularly in this case – when users might see a 64-bit Mac viewer arrive for Firestorm.
Well, the answer to this second question might be in the famous phrase, Real Soon NowTM.
Tonya Souther, a member of the Firestorm development team, brought word on Wednesday July 2nd that a 64-bit version of Firestorm for OS X should debut with the next Firestorm release – although it is liable to be a few months before that release is made.
Tonya has been building on the work started by Cinder Roxley – whom she acknowledges in the blog post – and has been getting things to a point where it is possible to compile a 64-bit version of Firestorm which will run on Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) or later.
Firestorm developer Tonya Souther
A major part of this work has been in rebuilding the third-party libraries used in compiling the viewer, and Tonya explains some of the bumps in the road she encountered along the way to getting things sorted out. She also offers her own code repository for people to see what she has done in bringing everything together.
The results of Tonya’s efforts now resides in the Firestorm master repository, and will build successfully in either 64-bit or 32-bit, should anyone who self-compiles the viewer wish to give it a try.
Tonya advises anyone who does so, that in order to build a 64-bit Mac version, they must use Nicky Dasmijn’s version of the autobuild tool and specify the -m64 switch, although nothing else changes.
Tonya also goes on to state in reference to self-compiling:
If you’re switching from building a 32-bit Firestorm to building a 64-bit version, you should probably specify --clean to make sure you start fresh with everything at 64 bits. You also need to do a --clean when building for OS X from repository revisions after the change (revision 42327 or higher) if you’ve previously built for revisions before the change (42298 and lower).
As noted towards the top of this article, .DMG files for the Mac 64-bit build will probably not be made available until the next formal Firestorm release for all three platforms, so please do not request them from the Firestorm team before then. Also, and as with all 64-bit viewer versions, there will be no SL-specific version of the Mac 64-bit release when it does officially arrive, until such time as the Lab provides a 64-bit version of the Havok library used within SL-specific viewers.
Finally, and as advanced warning, Tonya notes that once the 64-bit version of Firestorm for Mac officially debuts, the Firestorm team will cease their support of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard – which is in keeping with the Lab’s ceasing support of OS X 10.6 in April 2014.
For further information, and for technical enquiries, please see Tonya’s blog post.
Jessica Lyon has announced that the Firestorm team will be hosting a Q&A session entitled The Future of Second Life.
The session will take place on Wednesday July 2nd at 07:00 SLT (that’s 7:00 AM PDT – I’ve always used 24-hour clock notation in this blog) at the Firestorm Auditorium, with seating on a first come, first serve basis.
Oz Linden: Linden Lab’s Technical Director of Second Life
In attendance will be Oz Linden, Technical Director of Second Life at the Lab. Peter Gray, the Lab’s Director of Global Communications may also be present as well.
Note that the focus of the session will Second Life – the session will not be a forum for discussion of the Lab’s next generation platform. Opportunities to discuss the latter will doubtless come through various mediums once the Lab more solidly release details about it.
So if you want to learn more about what is planned for SL, this may be a meeting you want to attend. However, if you can’t attend, the blog post points to the following:
The event will be recorded and made available after the fact
The event will be live streamed though I do not have all the details yet. Stay tuned to this bullet for edits.
If you have questions to ask concerning SL’s future, please leave them in a comment on the Firestorm blog. Jessica will attempt to ask as many as she can. Please do not leave questions here, as they unlikely to be collected and asked at the session.
I’ll also most likely provide a transcript of the meeting as time allows after the event.
The Firestorm team have announced that version 4.4.0.33720 of the Firestorm viewer will be blocked from accessing Second Life and OpenSim starting on Thursday April 10th.
According to statistics from Linden Lab, there are some 5,500 people still using Firestorm 4.4.0.33720, which lacks support for many significant features, including Sever-side Appearance, Materials Processing and Fitted Mesh. Nor does it include support for many of the server / viewer improvements released over the course of the last year, including interest list updates and HTTP improvements.
Those people still running 4.4.0 are being strongly urged to update their Firestorm viewer to 4.4.2 or later prior to the block commencing on Thursday (no actual time is given in the blog post). Those already running 4.4.2 or later need not take any action – this does not affect you.
The block is being implemented as a part of Firestorm’s policy to, as far as is possible, only have three active versions of the viewer accessing Second Life at any given time. Unfortunately, OpenSim is also affected as the team do not currently have the means to selectively block older versions of the viewer from accessing individual grids at this time. However, this is expected to change when the time comes to block another release in the future.
On April 1st, the Firestorm team released and April Fools video in the spirit of their 2013 “Firestorm Mobile” hoax.
As fun it was, there was a secret within the joke which many – including me – missed at the first watching of the video, largely because we didn’t follow the suggestion and manually type the URL at the end of the video into a web browser.
For those who may have missed things, and to provide a frame of reference, I’m including the video in this post as well.
Jessica Lyon contacted me just after I’d published a post on the Firestorm and Catznip April Fools and gave me a proper “Gotcha!” So, having taken the time to stay quiet on the matter, as Jessica requested (and in order to go wipe the egg from my face!), I’m here to say, as many Firestorm users have been poking me about over the last 24-hours, that the Firestorm Dynamic User Interface isn’t a joke. It’s here. I’m using it. What’s more the Firestorm team have now blogged to confirm it.
The viewer,Firestorm 4.6.1.40484 is available for download for Windows only, and will run on both Second Life and OpenSim.
It really isn’t an April Fools – Firestorm 4.6.1.40484 really does allow you to move some floaters outside of the viewer window!
Now, the viewer – as Jessica and the team wish to express loud and clear – isn’t the finished article. It’s currently experimental, and as such, subject to unpredictable behaviour. It is not recommended for use as a primary viewer.
There are also some other points to note:
Not all of the floaters in the viewer may be capable of being pulled out of the viewer window. Those that can appear to float “above” the viewer window, rather than “in” it
Not all of thefloaters work smoothly at this time, and may be subject to jumping and / or, flickering, and options on menus associated with them may not be accessible as a result. There may be other issues, such as:
You cannot drag / drop items from the Inventory floater in-world
Conversations in the communications floater tabs may not scroll soothly
Floaters outside of the viewer window cannot be resizedYou cannot resize those floaters which can be moved outside of the viewer window
Torn-off menus cannot as yet be floated
The conversations floater can be pulled out of the viewer – but if you detach a specific IM tab, it will bounce back into the viewer window and cannot currently be dragged back out
Discussing the viewer with me after pointing out I’d been had with the April Fools video, Jessica said:
The intention is that we want to release this code in the hopes that ALL open-source developers out there, TPVs included, will pick it up. fix it, improve it, expand its capability and most importantly SHARE it with one another. It is my hope that this may become a catalyst to renew interest in viewer development among inactive developers and that ultimately this will open a whole new realm of possibilities for SL viewer technology moving forward.
We will not be assigning the gentleman’s agreement on this… it’s too important to make this about credit. I don’t care who releases it first as long as the code is shared equally. We will also work on improving it, but I think this should be a community effort.
Having detachable floaters like this has been one of the Holy Grails for the SL viewer, and has long, and oft been requested. However, the Lab has generally taken the view that to get something like this working would take a considerable amount of effort. The Firestorm’s team work is therefore very much pre-proof-of-concept, as their blog post on the matter indicates:
Firestorm DUI is little more than a very early proof of concept that a dynamic user interface is in fact possible with Virtual World viewers … our very own Nicky Dasmijn managed to come up with this in a relatively short amount of time, and we hope that it will translate to this functionality being available in a reasonable amount of time …
So, if you haven’t already taken it for a test-drive, and remembering the Firestorm DUI isn’t a release, and there may be issues with using it, and that it is not supported by Firestorm at this point in time. So again, when using it, please do notuse it as your primary viewer.
Please don’t report any issues with the viewer here; I’m not a part of the Firestorm team, and cannot help you. As mentioned above, the DUI viewer is currently unsupported!
The Firestorm have been working hard on readying a new release of the viewer. Beta version of Firestorm 4.5.2 have been under beta evaluation for the last week or so, (and is looking good – the most recent version appears to have cured an issue I’ve had with Firestorm and my GTX 660 GPU, so right now I’m a very happy bunny).
There are still some decisions to be made, as a result, the next Firestorm Q&A session will be on Saturday February 15th. As per usual, the venue for the meeting will be the Phoenix Firestorm Support Island theatre, commencing at 16:00 SLT.
Jessica and the firestorm team promise “exciting news” at the next Q&A session
References to some “great news” and “exciting times are coming” within the blog post announcing the meeting has led to speculation as to what might be announced.
As well as working directly on the viewer, members of the Firestorm team have, as reported in these pages, been working on integrating Leap Motion into the viewer on behalf of the Lab and Leap Motion – so rumours have been circulating that the next release will include Leap Motion support, and it would seem that initial support for the device may be available in one form or another.
Those who use Firestorm for their SL photography may well have a nice little surprise waiting for them as well 😉 , as might Linux users.
However, the best way to be sure of what is coming is to attend the meeting. As usual, and on behalf of the team, I’ll be providing a transcript after the fact.
Following the recent release of Firestorm 4.6.7 (see my overview for details), the Firestorm team has announced that Firestorm 4.5.1 will be blocked as from Friday September 12th, 2014.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 