Tag: Firestorm

In the Firestorm Tool Tip Tuesday video for Tuesday March 31st, 2015, Jessica takes a look at the assorted tools and options Firestorm provides in order to assist people with in-world building. As with some of the other TTT video, various options described within the video are not exclusive to Firestorm, which makes the video a worthwhile watch by anyone wishing to get more to grips with building, manipulating prims, and so on; although admittedly, if you’re not using Firestorm, you’ll have to poke at your preferred viewer’s Preferences, etc., to see where the options might reside.

Starting with changing the default colour of the basic rezzed prim shapes, the default size, prim status (physical, phantom, etc), and the next owner permissions (a function now common to all viewers, including LL’s own), Jessica takes a rapid-fire run through many of the the more frequently used build options and tool additions.

This includes a look as assorted features within the build floater itself, many of which are, again, presented through other viewers as well, including the ever-popular prim alignment option (which, sadly, remains as something the Lab have refused to adopt, as they feel it does not fulfil enough potential use cases, despite the fact it actually achieves precisely what it sets out to do).

The video concludes with a look at the Z-drop and Z-take options, which respectively allow you to drop the contents of a folder into an in-world prim without needing to select and physically drag-and-drop them, and to take a number of in-world objects and place them within a root folder in your inventory – both of which are powerful and useful options, before finally providing an overview of one of the most useful building resources within Second Life: Builder’s Brewery. You can also find out more about BB through their website.

Getting to grips with building isn’t easy, and while this video isn’t intended as a beginning guide, for those who have paddled in the shallows of building, it offers some very useful pointers. Even those with a little more experience might also find it contains some interesting little tips!

In the Firestorm Tool Tip Tuesday video for Tuesday March 3rd, 2015, Jessica gave a rapid-fire overview of performing a clean install. In trying to keep the video to around 5 minutes in length, the result, while informative, came across as rushed.

Given people did feel the first video did feel hurried, and that clean installs can be a necessary part of viewer life, the latest Tool Tip Tuesday video from Jessica might be referred to as “Clean installs: the Director’s Cut”.

With a running time a little under 13 minutes, the new video provides greater information and clearer instructions on:

• Saving your chat and IM logs to a custom location on your PC
• Using Firestorm’s backup capability to save and restore your viewer’s global and per-account settings
• Performing a clean install.

The video both complements the original clean install video, and stands as an instructional guide in its own right, providing a lot more explanation and background. So, if you were confused by the speed of delivery in the original video, this revisit may well be for you!

Update, March 10th: In response to feedback following the release of this video, Jessica released a more in-depth video examining clean isntalls, settings back-ups, etc. The new video can be found here.

The Firestorm Tool Tip Tuesday video for March 3rd, 2015, covers what can be a thorny and intimidating issue: that of performing a clean install of the viewer.

In an ideal world, clean installs wouldn’t be needed. However, there are times when installing a newer version of a viewer over an existing version, that things which shouldn’t happen do happen, and things that should have happened don’t happen correctly. And while the frequency with which people are asked to perform clean installs have decreased in recent times for most viewers, they can still be the first step in avoiding later issues.

Where Firestorm is concerned, and given it has so many additionally exposed features with supporting UI elements and so on, the chances of something hiccuping during an install and causing problems later cannot be overlooked. Hence why, when releasing a particularly complex update to the viewer, or when dealing with support requests from users after a complex update being released, Firestorm support will often advise / ask if a clean install has been used with the new release.

To make things easier, the Firestorm team has provided additional capabilities within the viewer which allow you to not only save things like your chat logs, etc., to a dedicated folder to avoid them being lost as a result of a clean install (as is the case with all viewers), but they’ve provided a means to back-up and restore all of your viewer settings. However, even with these capabilities, performing a completely clean install can be a daunting task for many.

So in this video, Jessica takes you through her preferred method of running a clean install on a PC – starting from ensuring all or logs files and setting are safely saved  / backed-up through to launching the viewer after a clean install and restoring all of your settings.

The Firestorm Tool Tip Tuesday video for Tuesday, February 24th offers insight into using local chat as a quick means of using a number of viewer-related and other command options.

This is achieved by using what Firestorm calls the “command line options”, which can also be found in some third-party viewers (Singularity being another which uses the capability). There are essentially pre-configured shortcuts which allow you to do a number of things; for example, you can quickly step your draw distance down / up, or teleport to a specific region or height within a region, rez a platform, and so on.

In the video, Jessica takes viewers through several of the more popular command line options as well as looking at some of the commands people might not be so familiar with, such as the calculator, turning your Firestorm AO off / on, clearing-down your local chat history display, and so on. She also touches upon customising the command names to make them easier to remember and use, if you need to.

So, if you’ve never looked into using chat command via the command line option, this is the video for you!