Ahead of the upcoming Firestorm release – which will be available Real SoonTM, (sorry, I can’t say when as Jessica would douse me in catnip and set the moggies on me 🙂 ), Jessica has been busy on a new set of video tutorials for users.
Some of the videos are specific to the upcoming release, and one is for those still using Phoenix and who wish to make the switch to Firestorm. This is something which has been covered before in Firestorm tutorials (and something I’ve attempted to cover myself in the past), but as things have moved on somewhat since those days, the new video has been produced.
The Firestorm 4.4.0 video cover features which are both new to the upcoming release, and which are updated in the upcoming release in comparison with earlier releases of the viewer – such as with object de-rendering, as per the video below.
On Thursday March 28th, Virtual Ability Inc will be hosting a presentation by Ed Merryman and Lette Ponnier about the Firestorm viewer and project.
Entitled Overview of the Firestorm Viewer and Project, the presentation will take place in both voice and text, and will commence at 11:00 SLT at the Blue Orchid Cabana, Virtual Ability Island.
The promotional material for the presentation reads:
Learn about what makes the Firestorm Viewer and the project on the whole unique. We’ll discuss some of its most popular features and customizability options and cover how to find help and more information from our large and active support team and its resources.
The Presenters
Ed Merryman – Voice
Ed Merryman joined SL in September 2007. He is the Firestorm Support Team manager, and has led the team since the Firestorm Project was established in September 2010.
Ed Merryman and Lette Ponnier – talking about Firestorm at Virtual Ability Island on Thursday March 28th, commencing at 11:00 SLT
Lette Ponnier – Text
Lette Ponnier has been involved in Second Life since early 2008. A keen member of SL’s small, but thriving, open chat trivia community, Lette has been an integral part of the Firestorm team since February 2011 where she head-up the English Language Support team. She also specialises in providing help to Firestorm Mac users.
As well as providing support to Firestorm users, both Lette and Ed are active teachers for the team, and present weekly classes about the viewer which are open to anyone to attend, no matter what level of experience they have with the Firestorm viewer.
So, if you’re curious as to why Firestorm is so popular among Second Life’s users, and / or about trying the viewer out for yourself, why not make a note to drop into Virtual Ability Island on Thursday March 28th?
The Firestorm team have announced the re-opening of their Second Life release preview group, for those who are interested in assisting the team with identifying potential issues / bugs with new releases of the Firestorm viewer.
The announcement, entitled “Feeling Brave?” from Jessica Lyon, reads in part:
“The perfect understanding of an event after it has happened, often when you realize too late what you could have done to avoid it.” We had one of those moments shortly after our last Firestorm release when we discovered that quite a few users were experiencing a bug that made their screens pink. This bug had slipped past our Quality Assurance team and went out in the official release. The hindsight is that we could have offered a pre-release to a larger number of users than what we have in our beta group. Chances are they would have discovered the bug, we would have fixed it and it would not have been released with that bug.
Jessica Lyon: call to the brave – and those willing to follow the rules!
With this in mind, the Preview group has been re-opened in order to try to ensure potentially obvious bugs don’t slip through the net in future and, as with all Firestorm groups, is on open membership. However, as Jessica notes, there are some rules those joining are asked to abide by:
We need your feedback. Please do not just grab the pre-release and run away. That would defeat the purpose of what we are doing, and we will not do it again. Remain in the group and report issues you’ve found. It’s especially important that you report them to our JIRA. Not familiar with or comfortable using the JIRA? We have a wiki page and a Reporting Bugs class to get you acquainted with it.
Do not give the viewer download link out to anyone outside the group. That kind of thing goes viral very quickly, and if we discover during the pre-release test phase that there are some major bugs or worse — exploits — we will have already lost control of the build. If your friends want to use the viewer, the preview group is open to them, as well. The rules apply to them, too.
Re-read rules #1 and #2.
So, if you have an interest in test-driving viewers, and are willing to abide by the stated rules, the Firestorm Preview group might be a group to consider.
Update February 25th: As per a comment from Jessica Lyon, Firestorm have now merged the Server-side Baking code and updates to RLVa into one of their private repositories.
Update, 19th February: A transcript of the core part of the meeting, including Jessica’s Firestorm status overview and the Q&A session, complete with the video recording, is now available.
Update, 14th February: The initial video recording of the meeting is now available on YouTube, and an HD version will be available soon.
Wednesday February 13th saw the Firestorm team host an open meeting to discuss what is happening vis-à-vis Firestorm given all the various ongoing viewer-related projects currently underway (CHUI, materials processing, server-side baking, plus Firestorm’s own updates and improvements) – and when the next release is liable to hit the public at large,
Several members of both the Firestorm development and support teams were on-hand to field questions, with Project Lead Jessica Lyon leading things off with a 15-20 minute overview as to what is happening, where the viewer stands at this point in time, what the plans are for the immediate future and what we might expect to see in Firestorm in upcoming releases.
The Short Version
The Good:
Firestorm will be supporting all of the new viewer capabilities coming out of LL, although CHUI will require careful consideration as to what is adopted and how, as Firestorm already offers several similar options to those being added to the viewer by CHUI
Firestorm will be getting a range of new features (although not all at once) which include: further work on re-implementing legacy search capabilities, the ability to save and reload personal settings; more OpenSim support; new windlight settings; new UI skinning; further work on adding v1-style functionality
The Not-so-good:
Serious crash and other issues have also come to light in merging Firestorm with the latest LL 3.4.5 code which the team are endeavouring to resolve
Server-side baking (SSB) is the priority for the Firestorm team at present (as it is with other TPVs), as it has a major impact on how people will see things in-world, and it is the project which LL are emphasising. However, integration of the SSB code into TPVs (particularly those supporting RLVa) is not proving easy
The emphasis on work at the moment is overcoming bugs, issues and problems and trying to get Firestorm to a point where it is running the SSB code.
Taken together, the latter points mean that while a new version of Firestorm is in development, there will be something a further wait before it appears, and when it does, it my not have such a huge range of new features as has been found in previous releases and might suffer from stability issues.
Jessica Lyon (seated centre, at the edge of the stage) with members of the Firestorm development and support teams, discusses Firestorm on Wednesday February 13th
Viewer Status
There are some serious issues within the Firestorm development code which are delaying progress towards a potential release. Firestorm has been merged-up to the Linden Lab 3.4.5 viewer code, and this has given rise to some severe problems for Firestorm (and is actually having an impact on other projects, as I reported earlier this week).
Commenting on the situation, Jessica Lyon pulled no punches, stating:
I’m going to be completely honest with you guys. Right now Firestorm, for us internally, is in pretty bad shape since our merge with Linden Lab’s TIP (3.4.5 code). There are a lot of bugs that we’ve inherited; there’s a lot of regressions which we’ve inherited. Ed [Merryman, lead for Firestorm Support] is crashing about two times a day – and for those of you know Ed, know that Ed never crashes. So if Ed is crashing on our recent builds, we’ve got some problems. We’ve got some log-out crashes, log-out things; log-in crashes … Basically, we’re not in great shape, and we’ve got a lot of fixing-up to do before we’re ready for a release.
As well as inheriting bugs, the merge has also highlighted bugs and issues within the Firestorm code itself which also need to be fixed. All of this adds up to recent builds for the viewer being “way worse” than the current release version in terms of stability and issues, and it is going to be a while before these issues are fully resolved.
Server-side Baking
Server-side baking is perhaps the most prominent viewer project underway at the moment, inasmuch as it is essential that all viewers connecting to Second Life be able to support it in order to avoid in-world experiences from being broken. Simply put, avatar skins and system clothing will not render on viewers which do not support SSB once the code is fully deployed, as shown below. )Things are somewhat more involved than that, and for those unfamiliar with the project, I’ve covered it in-depth in Avatar Baking: “and the clock has started!”. )
The SSB problem in part: I’m standing on an SSB-enabled region. On the left – as I appear to others who are using an SSB-enabled viewer; On the right, as I appear to others who are using a viewer which does not support SSB.
As it stands, Firestorm has yet to be merged with the Lab’s supplied server-side baking code for the viewer, although work has been underway within the team in a separate repository to the 3.4.5 code merge. A major problem here, as I again reported earlier this week, is that SSB has considerable (and negative) impact with RLVa. These problems are compounded by the fact that the test regions for SSB functionality are all on Aditi, which has considerable issues of its own at the moment, which are affecting people’s ability to reliably test code, and all have scripts disabled – which makes testing RLVa fixes alongside SSB somewhat difficult.
Currently, the Lab remains sympathetic to the issues TPVs are facing (and have offered help wherever practicable), and are not currently pushing a date by which TPVs must be ready for SSB to go live. They’ve also acknowledged that some of the problems TPVs are facing are down to delays on the Lab’s part, such as not making any bug fixes to the viewer code available until January 30th, some seven weeks into the planned eight-week window in which it had been hoped TPVs would be able to integrate the code. However, it is clear that TPVs are feeling under pressure to get SSB-capable versions of their viewers sooner rather than later.
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Jessica Lyon, project lead for the Firestorm team, has announced that there will be a limited capacity meeting on Wednesday 13th February at 13:00 SLT, to discuss the Firestorm project. The core part of the announcement reads:
Every once in a while, and probably not often enough, we host a Question and Answer session in Second Life for the Second Life community. The purpose is to give us the opportunity to update you all with what we are doing and give you the opportunity to have a say, ask questions you may have to the team, voice complaints, make requests and in general communicate with us directly. This Q&A will not be quite like our office hours. It will not be as formal, it will be far less structured, and it will not be streamed live.
Seating is limited to 70 avatars and is first come first serve. We will, however, try to record it and offer the recording for folks who couldn’t make it.
All are invited, fans and haters alike, people who use our viewers and those who don’t… everyone. All questions are welcome, we only ask that language be kept PG and folks be civil to each other.
Again, note that the meeting will not be streamed live. The venue for the meeting is the Firestorm Office Hours meeting place on the Phoenix Firestorm support region.
As a result of the release of the Group Services project code to all of the main grid this week (see my SL Projects news report), The Firestorm team have released a beta version of their upcoming Firestorm viewer update.
The new Group Services code allows for improved loading of membership lists of very large groups, together with improved reliability in editing such groups (i.e. assigning roles, removing people, etc.), by the group moderators. however, in order to be used, it requires additional viewer-side code. Without this additional code, the viewer will be unable to display membership lists for groups with more than 10K members.
To overcome this, and to allow Firestorm users who manage very large groups, the Firestorm team have released a beta version of the Firestorm viewer which includes the necessary code – as well as a lot of other updates.
Group Services update – the difference: On the left, an attempt to load a group with almost 20K of members in the current release of Firestorm 4.2.2. On the right, the same group loaded using the new Firestorm 4.3.0 beta.
Announcing the release, Jessica Lyon, the project manager for Firestorm notes, that while this is not an official Firestorm release, it will be supported by the team but requests that only those who need to manage and edit groups with more than 10,000 members download and install this release. She comments:
NOTE: – This is NOT an official release, but we will provide support for it. – This has NOT been thoroughly tested by our Quality Assurance team. – We can NOT make any promises regarding how stable or bug-free it is. – This DOES have some really cool new stuff in it!
USE IT IF: – You need to manage large groups inworld. – You’re tired of seeing unknown alert messages in Phoenix. – You’re feeling brave, you live on the cutting edge and you want to get an early look at what’s coming in December’s Official Release.
This release means that Firestorm joins Niran’s Viewer, Zen, and Cool VL viewer alongside the official beta viewer in enabling large group editing.
Havok Sub-licence
This beta also includes code to access LL’s new Havok libraries. This means that it will be able to view the pathfinding navmesh, but as a result of the sub-licence arrangement, it will not be able to access OpenSim grids.
Downloading and Installing
The beta viewer is available here for Windows, Mac and Linux. As usual, a completely clean install is recommended for the most stable results.
A full review of the new Firestorm release will be appearing on these pages in due course.
A Note on Phoenix
The blog post from Jessica includes a section directed at those still using the Phoenix viewer, in which she states:
Our developers and support staff have been extremely busy trying to balance their real working and personal lives while continuing their volunteer efforts to develop SL’s most popular viewer for you. Unfortunately, most of us cannot easily compile Phoenix anymore because of missing/expired libraries like Fmod, compiler changes we’ve had to make for Firestorm, OS upgrades (Win8), etc. To update Phoenix to current LL code now would be a very, very big task and, because we are already at our limit of what we can do, there are no plans to update Phoenix Viewer to support this new group code or handle the new notification system at this time. We are, after all, only human.
This is unlikely to make popular reading in some quarters. However, as Jessica notes, the team have striven to make Firestorm’s front-end as much like Phoenix / Viewer-1 as humanly possible. While it is not possible to revert menus, etc. fully to the Phoenix format, the skinning and broad approach to getting as much of the look and feel on Phoenix into Firestorm should go a long way towards easing people willing to make the conversion a lot easier.
This does not mean the end of the road for Phoenix, but with user number falling and Firestorm proving to be a much more stable and reliable viewer which is capable of embracing viewer changes being driven out of LL, it is understandable that the Firestorm team is sounding a warning note as to the future and continued enhancement of Phoenix.
Ahead of the upcoming Firestorm release – which will be available Real SoonTM, (sorry, I can’t say when as Jessica would douse me in catnip and set the moggies on me 🙂 ), Jessica has been busy on a new set of video tutorials for users.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 