new Firestorm update

[Derf Fairport]

I can't even move in world, after several logins and yes I do have enough ram for 64bit version, Help please?   Anything I can switch off that's been tacked on to this version??

Edited December 10, 2020 by Derf Fairport

[Nick0678]

Maybe it's time to keep a backup of your old firestorm settings (just in case) and start with fresh ones since your computer has good specs.

Check the Firestorm FAQ for a how to.

(It's a bit slower on older pc's and that's expected behavior but not so much that you can't even walk as you can see in the comparison video bellow between the nonEEP and latest EEP on a 2011 i5. )

 

 

[velvetgurl]

i am having probs, with it as well low fps 4, on the other version i get 20 fps, also graphics gliches so i reverted back, and yet the beta testers in sl where saying it was ok, and when i aksed about the prob there i got abuse hurled at me someone called me a spoilt female dog , this is not funny

Edited December 14, 2020 by binder59
bad word

[CattyAnnaH]

I don't care about all the talk over how good the latest version of FS is, the fact that I have used FS for god knows how many years and kept the same windlight settings has been a godsend when I have moved from release to release.

 

And today ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

 

The process for moving to your own fixed environment settings for me has completely and utterly flopped!

I did it, set up the environment folder in my inventory copied in the two settings I use for water and light and every time I changed sim they reverted back to sim setting.

And yes I did go into FS preferences and change it to persist seesion sttings and also put a 3.5 second transition time in.

So if i closed out the Fixed Enviroment window in Environment everything just went black, if I didn't leave it minimised as I jumped from sim to sim everything went black.

May I remind FS that I am the ultimate user of the program and if there comes a point where FS does things I am unable to remedy by wanting to set up the program to work for me, then I will consider whether or not my time in SL is ending.

A but harsh , but today has been a waste of time trying to sort out an issue that SL should have had the guts to announce in that they were going to terminate a lot of the older windlight settings, I personally also don't like the registry keys grab by FS as I also use Singularity as it still allows XML export for character tests something that FS has stopped supporting.

[Aishagain]

It pains me to agree, but the new EEP system (as operating in FS 6.4.12) is an epic fail for me.  It cannot get the settings I want, at the moment moonrise looks more like sunrise than it should, the moon is a dullish blue and resetting to Default settings does not appear to set things back to what I remember as being default in Windlight days.

The overall performance is acceptable but the rendering, while I admit it looks fine most of the time (sun, moon and sky excepted).  In complex or busy environments by FPS is less than half what it was in the last  (6.3.9) version).

I accept that getting my head around EEP will take time but currently it makes almost no sense to me!

Edited December 16, 2020 by Aishagain
spelling correction

[Chic Aeon]

1 hour ago, CattyAnnaH said:

A but harsh , but today has been a waste of time trying to sort out an issue that SL should have had the guts to announce in that they were going to terminate a lot of the older windlight settings

They did announce long ago and there were and are instructions in the knowledge base to on how to move over your personal Windlight settings (this of course before you changed to the new EEP viewer). Not all settings move over well however. AND you can get all the old Windlight settings (a TON) that haven't been added to the viewer (there are plenty moved over for you) on the Marketplace. Check the other older thread on this for more info if you care.

 

Most folks haven't been in love with EEP for years now, so this isn't really new news. Gotta read the official blog and the forums more often :D.  

[Penny Patton]

Here's a potential fix for the framerate loss.

As I've played with EEP the past few days I've gotten over most of my initial frustration. I think that will be true for most people, given enough time. (Some more time than others.) Still, there are some issues I really hope LL fixes, and soon.

• Moon turns dark near horizon.
• Moon brightness and colour tied to sunlight intensity.
• Everything is overly shiny.
• Not enough stars. We need a stars slider that adds more stars to the sky.

That said, the new features EEP brings to the table are fantastic. Here's a couple of skies that I've been tinkering with the past few days. If LL can sort out the big problems, these new features will totally be worth a few months of grumbling.

[Aishagain]

Well this is all well and good but EEP has been a "work in progress" for well over a year now and it is still very obviously not "fixed", leading me to suspect that it cannot BE fixed.  As far as I was concerned Windlight "days" looked good and I understood how to use them.  I never contemplated changing the day length and I still don't, so I really do not see what advantages EEP has for me.

That said I live on a Homestead not a parcel on a full region and not high in the air, so others will have different needs. 

I just see very little gain for a whole world of pain.

 

Edited December 16, 2020 by Aishagain
Grammar and punctuation

[Aishagain]

9 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

As I've played with EEP the past few days I've gotten over most of my initial frustration. I think that will be true for most people, given enough time. (Some more time than others.) Still, there are some issues I really hope LL fixes, and soon.

• Moon turns dark near horizon.
• Moon brightness and colour tied to sunlight intensity.
• Everything is overly shiny.
• Not enough stars. We need a stars slider that adds more stars to the sky.

Just this, although I have not, yet, got over my frustration with EEP.

Edited December 16, 2020 by Aishagain
Correction and additional text

[Madeline Mysterious]

I was able to login all day fine until i upgraded to the new viewer, now i can't login on my account anymore and I can't log my account in on any other viewers. I can log in with some old gacha holding account fine though on any viewer. 

[Qie Niangao]

3 hours ago, Madeline Mysterious said:

I was able to login all day fine until i upgraded to the new viewer, now i can't login on my account anymore and I can't log my account in on any other viewers. I can log in with some old gacha holding account fine though on any viewer. 

That part about also not working "on any other viewers" is scary because they'd all use different settings files, inherently doing what @Nick0678 suggested above. That would suggest the attempt to login to the new Firestorm somehow changed something server-side (such as -- horrors -- Inventory). Or maybe something changed server-side coincidentally with trying the new viewer. So... have you tried logging in to a different location? If that doesn't work, you'll need to explore the detailed failure condition (like, what the log file shows to be going wrong when login fails).

 

[Solar Legion]

There was work done earlier to try and solve connectivity issues. 

The advice given on the Grid Status entry is to try to log in to your dashboard through a normal browser, then try again in your viewer of choice. 

[Indy Melody]

After multiple attempts to update to the new Firestorm viewer, I finally did a full clean install before getting the new version installed correctly. When I attempted to log in, it would fail. After some research, I found this on the Firestorm wiki about log in failures. 

Group Tag Preventing Login There are cases when your active group tag will prevent log in - most usually when the tag contains unicode characters (though there have been isolated cases where even standard Latin characters have prevented log in as well).

login_fail [Phoenix Firestorm Project - Wiki] (firestormviewer.org)

I had a group tag on that had unicode characters in the tag. I logged into SL viewer and changed my group to none. Then when I logged back into Firestorm, it worked. The times I forget to change my tag before logging out, I have had to go thru the SL viewer to change my group to none before I could use Firestorm to log in.

 

[CattyAnnaH]

14 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

They did announce long ago and there were and are instructions in the knowledge base to on how to move over your personal Windlight settings (this of course before you changed to the new EEP viewer). Not all settings move over well however. AND you can get all the old Windlight settings (a TON) that haven't been added to the viewer (there are plenty moved over for you) on the Marketplace. Check the other older thread on this for more info if you care.

 

Most folks haven't been in love with EEP for years now, so this isn't really new news. Gotta read the official blog and the forums more often :D.  

Sorry to say if I can't make it work then a lot of people are not going to make it work as I am not that literate with the viewer and btw the settings I took came via the program from the library folder  you use to import them from, in short the process was an epic fail and another example of SL's decision making chain to release these concepts before a proper evaluation of their likely effects would be.

Ashagain spoke about the fact that after a year in development the concept of EEP does not seem to work as SL would hope it to, that tells you a lot about how SL's ability to develop the platform seems to be stalling.

Most businesses after a year in developing an idea would scrap it if it was not functioning correctly on order to stop wasting money, rather than persist in releasing something that could damage their product further.

I spoke to a friend who was a beta tester on it and she acknowledged that she had not seen what I was describing and when I showed her the before and after pictures regarding using windlight via the fixed enviroment cycle her answer was Whoa!

I've enclosed the pictures so people can see what happens, when I have the Fixed Environment Editor open and minimised everything is normal, the moment I close the editor the screen does the secod picture

[Solar Legion]

1. Second Life is the program, not the company - that is Linden Lab
2. The Editor is nothing more than a live preview, if you want to use what you've set up make sure you save it and then select/activate it from the Settings folder in your Inventory
3. You can still import the settings from the Library - see above

To put number two above a bit more simply: Expecting your settings to remain after you close the Editor without saving them so you can actually select and use them is akin to writing up a document in your word processing program of choice, typing up the document and then closing it, expecting it to be there for later use/alteration. You have to save it first.

[CattyAnnaH]

6 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

1. Second Life is the program, not the company - that is Linden Lab
2. The Editor is nothing more than a live preview, if you want to use what you've set up make sure you save it and then select/activate it from the Settings folder in your Inventory
3. You can still import the settings from the Library - see above

To put number two above a bit more simply: Expecting your settings to remain after you close the Editor without saving them so you can actually select and use them is akin to writing up a document in your word processing program of choice, typing up the document and then closing it, expecting it to be there for later use/alteration. You have to save it first.

I actually sorted it and found how to stick with the skies option

So after you load the chosen presets FROM the library into an Environment folder in your inventory  ( do not use the back up as you may get a message stating unable to decode legacy settings ) as offered by Firestorm.

You then if you wish to have a permanent cycle select world- my environments and when the drop down box shows you then take the tick out of the box for days option in the drop down after which you select the skies preset

Right click on that and it will offer "apply to self only" in that drop down menu, select that and it will then give you a permanent sky over a days cycle.

Pity FS didn't offer proper notes

[Solar Legion]

13 minutes ago, CattyAnnaH said:

I actually sorted it and found how to stick with the skies option

So after you load the chosen presets FROM the library into an Environment folder in your inventory  ( do not use the back up as you may get a message stating unable to decode legacy settings ) as offered by Firestorm.

You then if you wish to have a permanent cycle select world- my environments and when the drop down box shows you then take the tick out of the box for days option in the drop down after which you select the skies preset

Right click on that and it will offer "apply to self only" in that drop down menu, select that and it will then give you a permanent sky over a days cycle.

Pity FS didn't offer proper notes

Alternately if all you are doing is using one of the Library Presets for your Sky, use the Quick Preferences toolbar system (add it to your toolbar if it isn't there), hit the Sky dropdown box, pick one. Done.

If the above does not work, right click on the desired Sky in the Library and apply it to yourself from there.

By default (from personally observed behavior), Day Cycle defaults to None while the Sky and Water presets are set by the region.

It is - in that capacity - not much different from the old system with the exception of it actually having Library entries you can select.

This is putting aside the Knowledge Base articles on EEP (among other sources).

So, not much need for (in viewer) notes.

Edited December 16, 2020 by Solar Legion

[CandyCole]

I only just installed the new update.

The windlight thing is irritating but I found an acceptable setting and will use that until the rest can be figured out.

What irritates me most is that enormous 'Position' button and the 'Use Presets' button beneath it on the camera view floater.  Are those buttons big enough?!

Why they aren't located on the camera viewer's header bar I have no idea. An awful loss of screen real estate for something I have no need for. 

Any way to remove those two massive buttons?

[Aishagain]

@CandyColeI do three or four things to make this less of a pain. 

Firstly I resize the whole camera controls floater, by grabbing one edge and shrinking it accordingly. 

Secondly I make the floater partially transparent via Preferences. 

Thirdly I set up a camera position (using the "position" settings) that suits me as a rear, side and front view and save the position as one of the defaults (in other words I overwrite that default).

You need to remember that the defaults in debug settings can not be altered in current viewers (LL hard coded that, not FS)

Finally I move the whole camera floater partially off my screen (I place it centre bottom on my screen).  Those three presets can still be accessed on the floater header.  You should also remember that any presets  that you DO set can be accessed by the small icon on the top menu bar near the media controls. 

Job done!

Edited January 11, 2021 by Aishagain
Additional text and grammar correction

[Odaks]

12 minutes ago, Aishagain said:

I do three or four things to make this less of a pain. 

That is exactly what I have done! Its works very well - do it!

I like the easy access to other presets, too, even if I have to pull the floater up again to set them.

Edited January 11, 2021 by Odaks

[CandyCole]

On 1/11/2021 at 10:02 PM, Aishagain said:

@CandyColeI do three or four things to make this less of a pain. 

Thank you for your suggestion and I appreciate the replies.

I didn't do exactly what you said but you gave me the idea to simply switch the positions of my mini-map and camera view.  The mini-map now sits below the camera view and hides those enormous buttons, at least until I click on an arrow, which isn't that often but it does happen. Simple, but effective.

I most commonly look around by holding a left click on myself and then spinning around using the mouse, and move by double-clicking the ground or keyboard arrow keys.

Changes like this which shove a new feature in your face which you're either not immediately interested in, or have no interest in at all, can be frustrating. I am the latter.

I would imagine all users who've been on SL a while have their screen layouts just they way they like them. If everyday HUDs need to be moved it's like relocating the gear shift in your car. You get so used to driving your viewer with the layout you've created during your time in SL.

The length of the bottom of my viewer window has always been: Nearby Chat - Icon Only shortcuts - Animation Overrider -  Set Hover Height (stretched to the end. I never use those foot/shoe height change thingies).

Thanks!