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Thank You Firestorm


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I just wanted to thank the Firestorm team for releasing the viewer update! I am VERY pleased with the improved viewer so far... and I cannot wait to see the Fitted Mesh clothing. YAY!

P.S. Is it just me or do things look SO much better with this new viewer? Like my clothes, sky, etc just look much more rich & detailed!

LOVE IT!

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I normally use the LL official viewer, so I thought I'd test out the latest Firestorm.  

The result was.....    

Subjectively, no detectable difference in performance or graphics quality between the two viewers.   I teleported to the busiest, laggiest club I know and in both cases it took about 2 minutes for everything to be fully rezzed.

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Looking around I am still seeing a lot of people with their feet sticking through their shoes. Is fs still trying to tell people that invisi-prims still work. There are a lot of people that don't use fs and that could explain all the ugly feet I see. Or are there just a lot of people that have no clue what their feet look like. Was just wondering.

My viewers of choice are Kokua, Black Dragon, and LL.

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I don't know about Firestorm specifically, but Invisi-prims work on all viewers - provided Occlusion and Advanced Shaders (Or the setting that enables projectors?) are disabled.

Statistics collected first-hand suggest that less than 5% of encountered+tested users use these settings - so most people might still believe invisi-prims work.

Insert joke about 'shared experience' laugh-cry.

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This has nothing to do with Firestorm. The fact is that some people still use some old stuff which have invisiprims. They should update those things with Alpha Masked things.

How invisiprims work and don't work? In all viewers it goes like this:

Advanced Lighting Model = ON - Invisiprims do not work (ugly sticking feet out from shoes for example)
Advanced Lighting Model = OFF - Invisiprims work as they have always done

As more and more people are keeping Advanced Lighting Model on in their viewers it is better to avoid anything which uses invisiprims. In modifiable objects one can delete the invisiprims and use alpha masks instead.

 

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Conifer Dada wrote:

I normally use the LL official viewer, so I thought I'd test out the latest Firestorm.  

The result was.....    

Subjectively, no detectable difference in performance or graphics quality between the two viewers.

So Firestorm people now see what the rest of us have been seeing for the last 5 months.

Um ok. o.O

/golfclap

Well at least they're caught up for now. Lets hope we're not back to this in another 5 months.

ON the other hand I do applaud their resilience with dealing with the worst of the SL customer base on a very frequent basis (look at the logs of their meetings to see what I mean...). And in the last year they've finally been willing to force the issue with some of those people which has been a very good thing for SL's health.

 THey do need to reconsider their development process and keep current with official changes as those come out, and divide that out from the pace that they work on their own feature set.

 

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Coby Foden wrote:

This has nothing to do with Firestorm. The fact is that some people still use some old stuff which have invisiprims. They should update those things with Alpha Masked things.

How invisiprims work and don't work? In all viewers it goes like this
:

Advanced Lighting Model = ON
- Invisiprims do not work (ugly sticking feet out from shoes for example)

Advanced Lighting Model = OFF
- Invisiprims work as they have always done

As more and more people are keeping Advanced Lighting Model on in their viewers it is better to avoid anything which uses invisiprims. In modifiable objects one can delete the invisiprims and use alpha masks instead.

 

Doesn't it go deeper than this, "People using old stuff?"

Despite LL's warning that InvisiPrims were not supported and could get broken, everyone started using them. 

I don't know the whole history of InvisiPris but supposedly they were the result of a glitch.  Long discussion and background info here.

So Creators / Merchants either choosing to ignore or being unaware of LL's position plowed ahead and used them while in the meantime the vast majority of Residents bought their products completely unaware of the issues.

Then even after they were "broke," I still saw some unscrupulous practices.  One well known boot merchant, rather than fixing many of his old shoes, moved them to the budget section of his store.  Because of this, to this day I will never buy another shoe from this Merchant. 

I'm seeing currently a similar problem with a vehicle maker.  LL made a change recently that has caused a problem with many of his vehicles.  He has complained (told his customers) that LL broke something and the massive job it will be for him to redo all his scripts.

What I suspect really happenned is that he found an undocumented use for a script, said to himself, "this does what I need," and plowed ahead with it.  If LL changes the documented way a script works, that is one thing.  I don't think they take making those changes lightly.  But if you use something in an undocumented way, then the problem is yours and yours alone.

I know all of this sucks for the average user.  We could wish it weren't so but that really is the situation as best I understand it.

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:


Conifer Dada wrote:

I normally use the LL official viewer, so I thought I'd test out the latest Firestorm.  

The result was.....    

Subjectively, no detectable difference in performance or graphics quality between the two viewers.

So Firestorm people now see what the rest of us have been seeing for the last 5 months.

Um ok.
o.O

/golfclap

Well at least they're caught up for now. Lets hope we're not back to this in another 5 months.

ON the other hand I do applaud their resilience with dealing with the worst of the SL customer base on a very frequent basis (look at the logs of their meetings to see what I mean...). And in the last year they've finally been willing to force the issue with some of those people which has been a very good thing for SL's health.

 THey do need to reconsider their development process and keep current with official changes as those come out, and divide that out from the pace that they work on their own feature set.

 

How did you conclude this from her statement?  She made no statement about how Firestorm previosly compared subjectively to her.  What if by way of comparison the previous release had been the same for her?

 

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Perrie Juran wrote:


Pussycat Catnap wrote:


Conifer Dada wrote:

I normally use the LL official viewer, so I thought I'd test out the latest Firestorm.  

The result was.....    

Subjectively, no detectable difference in performance or graphics quality between the two viewers.

So Firestorm people now see what the rest of us have been seeing for the last 5 months.

 

How did you conclude this from her statement?  She made no statement about how Firestorm previosly compared subjectively to her.  What if by way of comparison the previous release had been the same for her?

 

Her statement was that she saw no change from the official viewer.

That's how I reached that.

Firestorm has caught up, after 5 months. Its no longer behind.

'bout time.

 

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Tarina Sewell wrote:

I still do not underhow a second life avatar is allowed on facebook.

Its not.

But you are welcome to announce on your Facebook right next to a photo of your real life self that 'some random furry' is your avatar in second life. :P

The silliness on this one is squarely on LLs shoulders - its their feature. Firestorm is just 'being compliant' adding it in. Facebook does not understand context. Way too much context collapse there... Even if your SL avatar is more or less your RL self - the contexts are typically different.

But some people like to put all their business up in one place... Or so Facebook desires.

And LLs has repeated NOT HEARD THE MESSAGE from us that its users disagree. That or... those of us who disagree make a much smaller segment of SL than we tend to believe. Or so LLs hopes.

 

 

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:


Perrie Juran wrote:


Pussycat Catnap wrote:


Conifer Dada wrote:

I normally use the LL official viewer, so I thought I'd test out the latest Firestorm.  

The result was.....    

Subjectively, no detectable difference in performance or graphics quality between the two viewers.

So Firestorm people now see what the rest of us have been seeing for the last 5 months.

 

How did you conclude this from her statement?  She made no statement about how Firestorm previosly compared subjectively to her.  What if by way of comparison the previous release had been the same for her?

 

Her statement was that she saw no change from the official viewer.

That's how I reached that.

Firestorm has caught up, after 5 months. Its no longer behind.

'bout time.

 

Part of the problem with  that logic is you are assuming that everyone using the Official Viewer sees the same thing when actually they don't.  Ummmm, how many graphics levels settings are there?

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Wow! That's a long time.  :smileysurprised:

For me uninstalling the 32bit beta version took about three minutes.
Installing the just released 64 bit version took about eight minutes.

So far I haven't uninstalled the 64 bit version as it appears to work very well for me.
So I cannot tell how long uninstalling it would take for me.

 

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:


Tarina Sewell wrote:

I still do not underhow a second life avatar is allowed on facebook.

Its not.

But you are welcome to announce on your Facebook right next to a photo of your real life self that 'some random furry' is your avatar in second life.
:P

The silliness on this one is squarely on LLs shoulders - its their feature. Firestorm is just 'being compliant' adding it in. Facebook does not understand context. Way too much context collapse there... Even if your SL avatar is more or less your RL self - the contexts are typically different.

But some people like to put all their business up in one place... Or so Facebook desires.

And LLs has repeated NOT HEARD THE MESSAGE from us that its users disagree. That or... those of us who disagree make a much smaller segment of SL than we tend to believe. Or so LLs hopes.

 

 

I've always expected more purges by Facebook.

The big purge back in 2011 upset a lot of people.  Link and Link.

Some people are content associating their RL accounts with SL.  But I bet they are a small minority.

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

 

Her statement was that she saw no change from the official viewer.

That's how I reached that.

Firestorm has caught up, after 5 months.
Its no longer behind.

'bout time.

 

 

Actually, no, from what I've read. There was a fitted mesh Project viewer released in late November. That was almost 4 months ago. The official fitted mesh supporting LL viewer release announcement was on February 10th, 2014. You can see it here if you've forgotten. That was 28 days ago, unless I counted wrong.

 

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To clarify what I was saying in my earlier post:

All I did was download Firestorm, log in, visit a couple of places, one of which I know is very busy and laggy, and see how long things took to rez.  Then I did the same with the official LL viewer and found the performance was about the same.

This was only a snapshot in time, I hadn't used Firestorm for ages before doing this, so I've no idea what it was like before the latest updates.  I was only comparing the latest Firestorm to the latest LL viewer.

I've used Firestorm in the past when there have been problems with the LL viewer, but that hasn't happened recently.

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But I don't see Pussycat saying anything about fitted mesh specifically. The Phoenix team says at the top of their announcement that the new release "has been a long time coming" and lists a few of the highlights that have been in Linden viewers for quite some time -- perhaps most notably, Monty's HTTP changes, and by adopting those the Firestorm viewer should again approach the Linden viewers' performance.

[ETA: Although, to be honest, I've been using Linden beta and RC viewers almost exclusively for a long time, just to try to catch bugs before they spread to TPVs and everywhere else, so my recollection of when features are introduced tends to skew toward earlier-than-release dates. Also, I don't mean to belittle the achievement of releasing a new, stable Firestorm viewer. There's a tremendous amount of source to merge when there are so many wide-ranging updates in the Linden code base. It seems the viewer has been getting a lot of fixes lately, with a lot more in progress right now, too.] 

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Caught up to what, exactly?

Fitted mesh hasn't been out but for about a month. Monty's HTTP changes haven't been out but for a week or so. In fact, we delayed this release specifically so we could pick up Monty's work.

We don't pick up stuff from LL until it's been merged into the release viewer. That way, we aren't fighting to merge things out of sequence, which causes a mountain of headaches.

In addition, LL develops lots of things in secret and doesn't release the code until it's almost ready to go in the release viewer. It takes time for us to merge those changes into the Firestorm codebase.

It will be exceedingly rare for us to release features at the same time as LL. More often, we'll be behind by a month or three. We can't prioritize LL changes over our own; most of our work as it is is wedging LL code into Firestorm.

If you really want to stay on the bleeding edge of LL features, you'll have to run the LL viewer. The rest of us will be just a bit behind, using the viewer for power users...Firestorm.

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Tonya Souther wrote:

 

If you really want to stay on the bleeding edge of LL features, you'll have to run the LL viewer. The rest of us will be just a bit behind, using the viewer for power users...Firestorm.

Those are incompatable statements.

If you're behind, you're not the choice of power users... You're just... behind the curve.

Caught up to what? Everything that's happened in the last 5 months - from materials to fitted and all the bug fixes in between. Read Firestorm's own list of changes to see the list.

As to the 'see what everyone else has been seeing' reply of 'well not everyone has the same graphics settings' - that's a straw man attempt to distract from the point. The point is that until 2 days ago, the ability of FS users to see what others saw was not there. Now their ability is the same. That is a point I made to counter the notion that they are innovating. They are not. They are catching up. There is a big difference.

 

Why does no other TPV have these issues? Singularity and Cool Viewer manage just fine - and they're on v1 UIs. The nightmare their devs face making this new stuff work for their UI is even worse. But they usually have a patch within days of an official viewer going live. Sometimes on the same day. Sometimes via the betas, they release their update a few hours BEFORE LL's puts up the final official.

I work in Silicon Valley. I know how an agile dev team operates. FS needs to splinter out its various projects and its code that stays current - and work in faster, smaller releases for each on different schedules from each other.

I get that they have the worst, most whiney user base. The worst of the worst in terms of inability to understand the technology one uses - those people are a subset of FS users. One only has to look at the logs of their support hours to see that. They may not be FS's typical users.

But they have landed on FS thanks to Phoenix being the child of Emerald. This gives their dev team a lot of added "challenges" dealing with "special people"... Something they've stated themselves in indirect polite ways. I'm sure that complicates the ability and motivation they have to stay current.

They need to just cut those people loose in terms of support. Shunt them back to LLs. Get back to focusing on the things that can make them competative as a TPV, and a split release cycle so they don't fall behind on the things from official sources.

 

*******

My "gripe" with Firestorm is a lot smaller than some of you seem to think though.

Not being an ardent fan doesn't make me an ardent opponent. But I do have a critical eye in their direction.

So I've said my piece on them, stated the advice I'd wish they'd follow; and am done until/unless the next bit of news changes something.

 

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

Caught up to what? Everything that's happened in the last 5 months - from materials to fitted and all the bug fixes in between. Read Firestorm's own list of changes to see the list.

In case you hadn't noticed, Firestorm has had materials support since 4.5.1.

The point is that until 2 days ago, the ability of FS users to see what others saw was not there.

If you're referring to materials, you're simply wrong. If not, then what are you referring to

Why does no other TPV have these issues? Singularity and Cool Viewer manage just fine - and they're on v1 UIs. The nightmare their devs face making this new stuff work for their UI is even worse. But they usually have a patch within days of an official viewer going live. Sometimes on the same day. Sometimes via the betas, they release their update a few hours BEFORE LL's puts up the final official.

They cheerfully run risks that we can't. They risk having to go back and manually do merges when LL releases code in a different order than what they merge. They risk LL's wrath from releasing code that hasn't been in an LL project viewer. They risk having to go back and do it all over again when LL changes the code they stuck in their viewer.

I work in Silicon Valley. I know how an agile dev team operates. FS needs to splinter out its various projects and its code that stays current - and work in faster, smaller releases for each on different schedules from each other.

Have you looked at the Firestorm codebase? (Or that of any other viewer?) It's not that neatly divided. It's one big 1MLOC mess. It's grown by accretion over a period of years, and to get to the point where we could neatly separate LL work from FS enhancements would take a major rearchitecting of the code.

If you think you can do better, I cordially invite you to try.

They need to just cut those people loose in terms of support. Shunt them back to LLs. Get back to focusing on the things that can make them competative as a TPV, and a split release cycle so they don't fall behind on the things from official sources.

Easy for you to say. Firestorm is competitive as a TPV as it is. The numbers prove it. If you don't like our pace of updates, then you're welcome to do better...or pick another viewer...or quit complaining and help out.

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Tonya Souther wrote:

Have you
looked
at the Firestorm codebase? (Or that of any other viewer?) It's not that neatly divided. It's one big 1MLOC mess. It's grown by accretion over a period of years, and to get to the point where we
could
neatly separate LL work from FS enhancements would take a major rearchitecting of the code.

I think it's not so much a feature of Firestorm's code that causes it to be so intricately intertwined with the LL viewer source as it is the fact that LL simply threw open the viewer source without any consideration for how contributors might sensibly contribute. Granted, that's just what an open source True Believer would want and all, but I suspect we'd have more interesting TPV features if instead LL had circumscribed the areas where third-party contributions were possible, with a plug-in architecture for their viewer. Or, anyway, that would have been a different course that might have turned out better, which was something that popped in my head when I learned that Google just released a new Docs plug-in capabiity.

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Qie Niangao wrote:

I think it's not so much a feature of Firestorm's code that causes it to be so intricately intertwined with the LL viewer source as it is the fact that LL simply threw open the viewer source without any consideration for how contributors might sensibly contribute.

Quite possibly, but that train left the station years ago. V2 would have been a good opportunity to do the necessary rearchitecting, but it wasn't done, and we're stuck with the results.

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