Firestorm and BoM?

[Marianne Little]

Hey, is there anyone who has heard a release date for  Firestorm with Bakes on Mesh?

I take it for granted that they are working with it.

[Alyona Su]

I'm positive I heard that it is a sure-bet that it will be release before December 26th. Honest and for true! (Maybe ask in FS groups for faster answer?) And I know you know I'm just funnin' - but feel a need to say that for the snowflakes. LOL

[AliciaMarieJames]

It usually takes Firestorm longer to get an update out than any of the other viewers.

They could've just set things up for BOM and released it by now.

[mehllama]

I'm not a coding geek so this is a bit Greek to me, but it sort of looks as if FS might be going for broke and trying to include the EEP update along with the BoM update. 

https://jira.firestormviewer.org/projects/FIRE?selectedItem=com.atlassian.jira.jira-projects-plugin:release-page

Oh, and the EEP thing has 18 more issues to work out at the time of this posting. 

Of course, they could be really going for broke and be shooting for the 7.0 release, which would mean they have those 18 plus at least 60 more issues to resolve. In that case, December (of 2020) might not be that far off =D

In all seriousness, I love the work they do but I am anxious to get my paws on FS BoM. Mainly because I use FS for so many reasons including its better camera controls - and also use its AO feature - so using another BoM viewer would be a major pain. On the other hand, Neither Maitreya nor Tonic have released their updates yet (although they have appliers patches to fake it till they make it).

Slightly off-topic: Cool VL Viewer added a neat feature that lets you see animesh objects on the minimap. I wonder if FS would pick that up. 

 

Edit: This article has some more thoughts on the FS BoM release timing and how EEP plays into it: http://blog.nalates.net/2019/09/18/second-life-news-week-38/3/

Basically, the article says the EEP release is probably behind schedule and as a standalone it would likely be ready in a few week, which is pretty soon after BoM if they released that now. 

So the FS team seems to be really under the gun as well as stuck between a rock and a hard place. While we chomp at the bit for the BoM release, I'm going to send a shout out of encouragement to their people who do the stuff I would have no clue about doing. It's always better to show up at the party a little late than with a crapola costume. 

 

Edited September 23, 2019 by mehllama

[Alyona Su]

BoM is still a nothing more than a novelty, so is EEP. Though I'm sure the firestorm team are working hard and as quickly as they can, there really isn't any hurry whatsoever.

[Whirly Fizzle]

Firestorm BOM will be released RealSoonNow(tm).

We actually have a publicly available FS BOM viewer available if you join the group "Phoenix-Firestorm Preview Group" - secondlife:///app/group/7ba4569c-9dd9-fed2-aaa7-36065d18a13c/about

Information & download links are in the group notices.

Enjoy 

[Whirly Fizzle]

4 hours ago, mehllama said:

I'm not a coding geek so this is a bit Greek to me, but it sort of looks as if FS might be going for broke and trying to include the EEP update along with the BoM update. 

Oh hell no  lol.
EEP is far from release ready yet, either LL EEP or FS EEP.

The JIRA issues you saw were from an early test merge of EEP. There will be no EEP code in the FS BOM release.

[mehllama]

17 hours ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

Oh hell no  lol.
EEP is far from release ready yet, either LL EEP or FS EEP.

The JIRA issues you saw were from an early test merge of EEP. There will be no EEP code in the FS BOM release.

Thank freaking heaven. And thanks for making sense of that. I just kept going back and seeing no movement at all on it and was feeling more and more like a lost puppy. 😂

[Ansariel Hiller]

On 9/23/2019 at 12:05 AM, AliciaMarieJames said:

It usually takes Firestorm longer to get an update out than any of the other viewers.

They could've just set things up for BOM and released it by now.

Given I have merged pretty much all LL development viewers on frequent basis, we could toss builds with the latest stuff at ya within a few hours - unless you don't want to be beta tester and run untested stuff...

Edited September 24, 2019 by Ansariel Hiller

[LittleMe Jewell]

On 9/23/2019 at 7:30 AM, Whirly Fizzle said:

  will be released RealSoonNow(tm).

I see what you did there.

 

 

🤣🤣🤣

[NiranV Dean]

On 9/24/2019 at 6:48 PM, Ansariel Hiller said:

Given I have merged pretty much all LL development viewers on frequent basis, we could toss builds with the latest stuff at ya within a few hours - unless you don't want to be beta tester and run untested stuff...

Poor beta testers... have to test untested stuff. Why the hell do you let beta testers test untested stuff that's what early access is for... and then there's also alphas, where are those alpha testers?

[Ansariel Hiller]

On 9/26/2019 at 2:51 AM, NiranV Dean said:

Poor beta testers... have to test untested stuff. Why the hell do you let beta testers test untested stuff that's what early access is for... and then there's also alphas, where are those alpha testers?

At least we have dedicated beta testers - unlike other viewers that constantly release untested stuff...

Edited September 27, 2019 by Ansariel Hiller

[NiranV Dean]

18 hours ago, Ansariel Hiller said:

At least we have dedicated beta testers - unlike other viewers that constantly release untested stuff...

At least i'm not telling myself that dedicated beta testing is in any way replaceable with "live" releases to the masses - unlike a certain other viewer that constantly releases broken stuff that's supposedly tested.

And round two:

At least i accepted the fact that users will always break your stuff shortly after release no matter how much care you put into it - unlike a certain other viewer, i can push a fix for it shortly after. 

The "need" for betatesters, the constant nagging of your users, the long release cycles. All problems of your own making. Just saying.

[Ansariel Hiller]

35 minutes ago, NiranV Dean said:

At least i'm not telling myself that dedicated beta testing is in any way replaceable with "live" releases to the masses - unlike a certain other viewer that constantly releases broken stuff that's supposedly tested.

And round two:

At least i accepted the fact that users will always break your stuff shortly after release no matter how much care you put into it - unlike a certain other viewer, i can push a fix for it shortly after. 

The "need" for betatesters, the constant nagging of your users, the long release cycles. All problems of your own making. Just saying.

At least we now know somebody has no idea about how software engineering works...

[Willow Wilder]

On 9/22/2019 at 6:05 PM, AliciaMarieJames said:

It usually takes Firestorm longer to get an update out than any of the other viewers.

They could've just set things up for BOM and released it by now.

The thing is, every time someone asks, the date gets pushed back a little more.  

Also the assumptions and speculations about how our team works during a release cycle, can be, shall we say, entertaining? amusing? 

[NiranV Dean]

1 hour ago, Ansariel Hiller said:

At least we now know somebody has no idea about how software engineering works...

HA. HA. Certainly you otherwise you wouldn't be delaying the entire development cycle of SL because of your release plans that never pan out as planned as we've seen countless times. You wouldn't even set up these stupid plans and back them up with cheap excuses like "our users don't like updating". I've seen smaller groups of people push less broken stuff in smaller timeframes and with less testing than your releases.

You clearly don't know the most important thing about development, which i already stated above. No matter your testing, users will always be users, they WILL break it and you can't do anything about it. Your rigerous testing is a rigerous waste of time that could be substituted with each developer testing their own feature as much as necessary and having a release when everything appears fine. Users will break it for you and find bugs you would have never though are possible, then you can actually start fixing your ***** and push fixes. Your long release cycles push you into this "we need to test this stuff as much as possible" mentality because you've set yourself these pointless "an release only every X months" limitations that force you to do it "right" the first time which is impossible with software as complex as this. Worst case you end up pushing the release further and further because it needs constantly more testing which at the end won't help because the moment users get it into their hands, it will break apart in spectacular ways.

But what do i espect from a team that can't even teach its own users proper movement and camera controls even though they have a huge dedicated newbie gateway thing and dedicated helpers for that. Let alone basic inworld content manipulation that isn't a "click this button and everything happens automatically" feature.

Everyone needs to find their own way of working with SL development but you have by far found the worst. Just look at Cool VL Viewer, on point regular updates with fixes and new features and no one complains there because it actually *****ing works and it doesn't halt SL as a whole. You'd do yourself a big favor by shrinking your updates this reduces the amount of time you need to test stuff and would allow your "betatesters" to focus their testing more and you would stop the rest of SL from waiting on you for so long every goddang time. 

Edited September 28, 2019 by NiranV Dean

[Jessica Lyon]

We have a few things no other third party viewer has...

Starting with the lions share of the Second Life user base. A ridiculous amount of users... insane amount of people relying on us... 

Which brings me to the other thing we do that no other TPV does.

We provide live support... to ALL of them, at no cost.

Beyond all the other reasons I won't get into details on, just the two above justify our strict and sometimes lengthy QA process.

We also must ensure our releases are of the best quality possible, because unlike smaller viewers who can release an update or hotfix on the fly without causing any ripples... (a few hundred or few thousand users). When we do that, well over 70% of SL users have to update their viewers and THAT is extremely disruptive and troublesome to everyone on the entire platform.

We do not have the luxury of being snappy with releases. We have a very heavy burden of responsibility to get it right each time we release.

Jessica Lyon

[Willow Wilder]

On 9/25/2019 at 8:51 PM, NiranV Dean said:

Poor beta testers... have to test untested stuff. Why the hell do you let beta testers test untested stuff that's what early access is for... and then there's also alphas, where are those alpha testers?

Why are you still so obsessed with Firestorm? Surely after all this time, you could find another obsession? Or is it Ansa you pine for? ( I get that. I really do.) 'Cause you know Jess loves you lots. 

[Whirly Fizzle]

[NiranV Dean]

1 hour ago, Jessica Lyon said:

We have a few things no other third party viewer has...

Starting with the lions share of the Second Life user base. A ridiculous amount of users... insane amount of people relying on us... 

Which brings me to the other thing we do that no other TPV does.

We provide live support... to ALL of them, at no cost.

Beyond all the other reasons I won't get into details on, just the two above justify our strict and sometimes lengthy QA process.

We also must ensure our releases are of the best quality possible, because unlike smaller viewers who can release an update or hotfix on the fly without causing any ripples... (a few hundred or few thousand users). When we do that, well over 70% of SL users have to update their viewers and THAT is extremely disruptive and troublesome to everyone on the entire platform.

We do not have the luxury of being snappy with releases. We have a very heavy burden of responsibility to get it right each time we release.

Jessica Lyon

We all do this at no cost. Check.

I do offer live support as well to anyone who simply contacts me, at any time, given i'm online. Otherwise i'll help whenever i'm back online (not SL but in general not afk or asleep).

You must ensure nothing unless we're talking about not violating the ToS/TPV rules. You don't owe anyone anything.

And you, like anyone else can release an update anytime you want. You (or your users) are pissing their pants over a 100-200mb download they have to do (which with your 3 version system they wouldn't even have to do immediately) occasionally, but no one loses his ***** over the gigabytes of content SL is live-downloading all the time. In todays standards it is totally normal to push updates frequently, infact this is even better than pushing them with big pauses inbetween as it gives you way more interaction with your userbase and valuable feedback and testing than any of your betatesters could ever provide to you in even the lenghiest of QA phases.

"Wen we do that, well over 70% of SL users have to update their viewers and THAT is extremely disruptive" ... so what about the rolling restarts constantly? What about the official Viewer which updates every 2 weeks or so? What about the other "30%" of SL that updates frequently. Those aren't disruptive to you but pushing more frequent updates is? Wow. You even have an auto updater and a way to block old versions, people don't have to do much other than clicking a button and wait.

Every day Discord has an update, every day i start Steam some game wants to download an update... and don't get me started on Early Access/Alpha/Beta titles who frequently push multi-gigabyte updates, no one cares about that.

Don't give me that crap with luxury of snappy releases, of course you do. You just chose not to use it because you fear your users complaining about stuff they shouldn't be complaining about in the first place, maybe you should rethink your strategy, maybe you should give people reasons to update, like telling them that their very issue is fixed in it. I haven't had anyone complain at me yet that they had to update the Viewer when they LITERALLY just updated it, they were happy that whatever problem they just had was fixed in the latest version. People love that, people love when you show them that you care about their problems, when you fix them or at least show them that you are working on it.

Your burden is your own inability to work with your users to find a good solution that doesn't compromise everyone else.

But hey, what do i know, i'm just a small viewer developer, i can do whatever the heck i want and no one will bat an eye because as you kinda implied certain rules seemingly don't apply to me.

1 hour ago, Willow Wilder said:

Why are you still so obsessed with Firestorm? Surely after all this time, you could find another obsession? Or is it Ansa you pine for? ( I get that. I really do.) 'Cause you know Jess loves you lots. 

I'm not obsessed with Firestorm. I just love Ansa. Jessica is just trying to take my Ansa away.

[Ansariel Hiller]

21 minutes ago, NiranV Dean said:

I'm not obsessed with Firestorm. I just love Ansa. Jessica is just trying to take my Ansa away.

Sorry, but somebody awesome took me away already - and it's not Jessica. Kinda shame tho, because I probably could have learned how software engineering and development really works since obviously everything I learned in the last 20 years must have been total nonsense then...

[elixdude]

 

On 9/12/2019 at 6:58 PM, Marianne Little said:

Hey, is there anyone who has heard a release date for  Firestorm with Bakes on Mesh?

I take it for granted that they are working with it.

It's already released now

[Chic Aeon]

https://www.firestormviewer.org/firestorm-6-3-2-58052-with-bom/

 

[Anna Nova]

I built the new 6.3.2 on Archlinux - works well, and the sim crossings seem better too (as well as the BoM).  Maybe I need to test dropping the BoM from my helicopter?  

[Alyona Su]

II am vindicated.