New Firestorm Version September 2022

[arabellajones]

I have installed the new Firestorm version, released on Friday, and it is running OK on Linux. This is v6.6.3.67470

This does feel like a quick release, but there have been a lot of changes to the SL viewer and this release is playing catch-up. It looks like one change is the handling of group notices. If you have been away for a few days, you will see a lot more accumulated.

It's pure luck that I caught it when I did, but there is no need to rush. The download site may be pretty busy.

With the Havoc code, the Windows version may feel a bit different.

[Ansariel Hiller]

There is no change in handling of group notices.

[Samara Sharkfin]

Normally I am not that keen to update as soon, but i was really eager to see the performance improvements. (I'm on Windows, and i was to busylazy to update the LL viewer)
The result is remarkable on my PC!

Then i read about the inventory improvements!
If you have a LARGE Inventory, i have 230K, this is a huge TIME SAVER! 
As a result of the new functionality, a second window now opens immediately!
Before, that toke 8-10 seconds for me. So no more fear to close the second window accidentally ("Noooooooo!")

The new "show in new window" function shows only objects, folder and sub folders, and not the whole inventory.
So now we have mini inventory windows \o/   (how many mini-inventories can one do? LOL)
And that way you can also do a search limited only to those folders and items, and do not get the results of your complete inventory anymore. \o/

Create folder from selected and ungroup folder items is also super usable for me. (shopping + ordering inventory)
This can also group folders.  It makes a new sub folder with those inside. That is what i always needed!

Show avatar attachment is another extreme time saver. Right click your attachment > and pop! there is it, in his mini-window \o/
This saves so many steps if you wear many new attachments  (...how was the name again of the new thing?...)

Big kudos and thanks to those who worked on it and added to Firestorm!
Very well done!

 

[Aishagain]

Just my two penn'orth on this release.  We were warned about two bugs in this release, inherited from LL.  One affects right clicking objects inworld,  I was told... for me this just does not seem to happen, except a minimal freeze on right clicking a scripted object.  For me it is so slight it is negligible.  I gather it is worse for others so I wonder if it is dependent on CPU  speed.

The other is  crash to desktop if you attempt to save a 360° snapshot.  Well, for me that is not an issue since I have NO idea what use I could make of it!

In short, the new Firestorm 6.6.3.67470 is simply the best viewer I have used in SL to date.  Busy clubs no longer force me to lower my quality level or reduce my FPS to slide-show speeds.

The base Linden Viewer changes were good, this is simply better!

Thankyou FS developers and testers you have given me my SL back.

[Jackson Redstar]

One word though: I been using beta FS the RC  6.6.3.67470 for a while now. these changes in code really do improve FPS - but they also can really max out the GPU too - so keep the inside of your puter clean and make sure air intakes aren't blocked. I always almost always keep v-synch checked on as well

[Aishagain]

Disabling V-sync on your SL viewer is tantamount to removing the waste-gate from the turbocharger of your car's engine.  Yes, it might go a bit faster....just before it goes "pop".  Disable V-sync at your peril.

Edited September 10, 2022 by Aishagain
spelling...I kan't spel

[NiranV Dean]

25 minutes ago, Aishagain said:

Disabling V-sync on your SL viewer is tantamount to removing the waste-gate from the turbocharger of your car's engine.  Yes, it might go a bit faster....just before it goes "pop".  Disable V-sync at your peril.

Dafuq are you implying?

Disabling VSync simply allows the Viewer to run as fast as your hardware allows. That is most commonly your CPU at ~20% and your GPU at ~50-60% unless you have a low sun angle, are indoors with a lot of shadows or you are using heavy shader loops (Depth of Field) in which case you'll most likely run your GPU at 100% usage and quickly start dropping your framerate at which point VSync becomes unnecessary anyway. None of these will make anything "pop". You make it sound like allowing SL to run at higher framerates is a bad thing. VSync's main purpose is to sync the refresh rate with that of your monitor to prevent screen tearing (which is literally impossible to get in SL anyway because SL does not run in fullscreen and any window/borderless application is incapable of screen tearing as they are subject to Windows's composite rendering which prevents screen tearing). VSync is nothing but a trashy way of limiting your framerate, which potentially adds unnecessary delay to input and in SL's case also slows the internal processes down making you rez and load things slower. I'd highly recommend leaving VSync off unless you are running hundreds of FPS and want to save some resources while the Viewer is active (there is an option to scale the Viewer's refresh rate back while in the background)

[Lucia Nightfire]

1 hour ago, NiranV Dean said:

Dafuq are you implying?

Disabling VSync simply allows the Viewer to run as fast as your hardware allows. That is most commonly your CPU at ~20% and your GPU at ~50-60% unless you have a low sun angle, are indoors with a lot of shadows or you are using heavy shader loops (Depth of Field) in which case you'll most likely run your GPU at 100% usage and quickly start dropping your framerate at which point VSync becomes unnecessary anyway. None of these will make anything "pop". You make it sound like allowing SL to run at higher framerates is a bad thing. VSync's main purpose is to sync the refresh rate with that of your monitor to prevent screen tearing (which is literally impossible to get in SL anyway because SL does not run in fullscreen and any window/borderless application is incapable of screen tearing as they are subject to Windows's composite rendering which prevents screen tearing). VSync is nothing but a trashy way of limiting your framerate, which potentially adds unnecessary delay to input and in SL's case also slows the internal processes down making you rez and load things slower. I'd highly recommend leaving VSync off unless you are running hundreds of FPS and want to save some resources while the Viewer is active (there is an option to scale the Viewer's refresh rate back while in the background)

To be fair, running with vsynch enabled allows my CPU to run at 33% less power consumption when I'm by myself in an unbusy region than with it disabled.

I'm sure everyone else's experience will differ, though.

[Beq Janus]

For my money, Vsync is a poor frame rate limiter. I have posted why on another thread, with caveats to say that I may be totally interpretting this the wrong way. What you will most likely get with vsync on is a far more choppy performance. (As noted on the other thread, I would be very happy to have this proven incorrect, and my misunderstanding of the OpenGL documentation clarified)

It will certainly save your fans and electric bills, I remain unconvinced that it will give you a nice experience while doing so. If you want to let your machine breath use the viewer's onw frame limiter which will force the viewer to take a little pause for breath between each frame.

Of course, the downside of vsync off is the increased risk of frame tearing. I'm wither immune to it or just don't suffer but having buffer swaps happening independent of vsync can lead to this. You now have choices. My choices are "VSync stays off and frame limit manually as you feel the need".

 

Edited September 10, 2022 by Beq Janus

[Aishagain]

Coo that got a lot of reaction.  Some of it thoughtfull and informative, some of it rude and rather idiotic in its style.

My comments were based on a thoroughly unscientific sample of an SL friend whose GPU attempted to set itself on fire before black screening and refusing to work again.

As Beq says the Framerate limiter does just as good a job of preventing pyromanic episodes and while I don't see the stutter or choppiness (possibly my GPU {NVidia GTX 1660Ti} never hits the heights of FPS that some gaming rigs do) the set up does allow my system to use its resources without becoming a room-heater  (I may need that this coming winter).  I had assumed that the framerate limiter was a FS or at least TPV feature and it was rarely needed except on very quiet regions with few avatars present.  A classic example of YMMV I suppose.

Given the performance that the latest render code gives, the choice between V-Sync and  the framerate  limiter is now valid, it would not have troubled me in past viewers.  I have not yet run for extended sessions with V-Sync disabled and I have used the limiter ever since it was introduced, so maybe I have no room to talk, but please be civil, it's not a lot to ask.

Edited September 11, 2022 by Aishagain

[Jackson Redstar]

excuse me for saying so - this is one of the very core problems of SL. only the most techie of techie understand all these options, yet these options are left to novices to figure out how to make for a good experience in SL. and even at that, there is disagreement on what different options do what and how it affects performance

[Solar Legion]

Yeah ... No.

I'm not that sort of Tech person and even I coulda told ya that VSync is a mixed bag. It's been around a long time in other applications, with the same mixed bag results.

[NiranV Dean]

3 hours ago, Aishagain said:

Coo that got a lot of reaction.  Some of it thoughtfull and informative, some of it rude and rather idiotic in its style.

My comments were based on a thoroughly unscientific sample of an SL friend whose GPU attempted to set itself on fire before black screening and refusing to work again.

As Beq says the Framerate limiter does just as good a job of preventing pyromanic episodes and while I don't see the stutter or choppiness (possibly my GPU {NVidia GTX 1660Ti} never hits the heights of FPS that some gaming rigs do) the set up does allow my system to use its resources without becoming a room-heater  (I may need that this coming winter).  I had assumed that the framerate limiter was a FS or at least TPV feature and it was rarely needed except on very quiet regions with few avatars present.  A classic example of YMMV I suppose.

Given the performance that the latest render code gives, the choice between V-Sync and  the framerate  limiter is now valid, it would not have troubled me in past viewers.  I have not yet run for extended sessions with V-Sync disabled and I have used the limiter ever since it was introduced, so maybe I have no room to talk, but please be civil, it's not a lot to ask.

If your GPU set itself on fire it was a bad GPU (like those RTX cards that burned themselves up in the main menu of New World), they were badly manufactured or weren't respecting their set limits. They were essentially running full power without turning the fans up to cool them. It was a combination of faulty BIOS and hardware issues if i remember correct. This is something that should never ever happen and will never ever happen unless we have another company forgetting hardware basics. The exceptions of course are the rare badly manufactured and not properly tested units that somehow make it out of production. Again this is not VSyncs fault and you should never ever use VSync with this as your reason.

 

5 hours ago, Beq Janus said:

Of course, the downside of vsync off is the increased risk of frame tearing. I'm wither immune to it or just don't suffer but having buffer swaps happening independent of vsync can lead to this. You now have choices. My choices are "VSync stays off and frame limit manually as you feel the need".

There is no risk of frame tearing, as described above Windows (since 7 at the very least) has a composite renderer that makes it impossible for screen tearing on desktop. SL cannot run in fullscreen, there is no way you will ever see screen tearing in SL unless you manage to disable the composite renderer (or the forced VSync on desktop that apparently is supposed to be a thing i heard)

[Aishagain]

Yes, this should never have happened,  the laptop was really rather unsuitable and had no cooling fans.  The card accelerated to failure in a way that was rather unexpected and we will see if the maker acts responsibly over the matter.

All the technical information has significantly improved  my understanding of these functions.  Shame it wasn't explained like this prior to all the hullabaloo.

Edited September 11, 2022 by Aishagain

[Ezbeharra]

10 hours ago, Jackson Redstar said:

excuse me for saying so - this is one of the very core problems of SL. only the most techie of techie understand all these options, yet these options are left to novices to figure out how to make for a good experience in SL. and even at that, there is disagreement on what different options do what and how it affects performance

 

10 hours ago, Solar Legion said:

Yeah ... No.

I'm not that sort of Tech person and even I coulda told ya that VSync is a mixed bag. It's been around a long time in other applications, with the same mixed bag results.

Yes you are that sort of Tech person because I didn't even know what vsync is until I read this thread, and the only reason I even bothered to look at the thread or these godawful forums at all was because the right click in world problem is really bad for me and I wondered if other people have it too (apparently it's worse for me than most, may have to roll back to the last version until it's fixed because it's a real nuisance). Anyway Jackson's point definitely stands, but now at least I can play with a setting I didn't understand before so that's cool I guess.

[xDancingStarx]

10 hours ago, Jackson Redstar said:

this is one of the very core problems of SL. only the most techie of techie understand all these options

No, it's not. Every game that I know has the option "Frame limiter" and "V-Sync". This is nothing unique to SL, at all. These options are also very much essential.

[Ezbeharra]

21 minutes ago, xDancingStarx said:

No, it's not. Every game that I know has the option "Frame limiter" and "V-Sync". This is nothing unique to SL, at all. These options are also very much essential.

Having the option and knowing what they do are two different things. Normal people don't think about this stuff. But whatever, nerd.

[Solar Legion]

52 minutes ago, Ezbeharra said:

Yes you are that sort of Tech person because I didn't even know what vsync is until I read this thread, and the only reason I even bothered to look at the thread or these godawful forums at all was because the right click in world problem is really bad for me and I wondered if other people have it too (apparently it's worse for me than most, may have to roll back to the last version until it's fixed because it's a real nuisance). Anyway Jackson's point definitely stands, but now at least I can play with a setting I didn't understand before so that's cool I guess.

That's nice.

No, I'm not and no it does not.

The function has been in pretty much every single gaming or gaming adjacent function for so long a time that it is utterly ridiculous and frankly not something one can miss in one's settings unless you're the sort that simply expects your programs to work with absolutely no configuration alterations whatsoever (among many other things).

The only things the average user needed to understand were that VSync can fix some stuttering/tearing problems and that disabling it can cause performance/heating issues.

19 minutes ago, Ezbeharra said:

Having the option and knowing what they do are two different things. Normal people don't think about this stuff. But whatever, nerd.

And that tells me all I need to know as well.

Congratulations - you're not the 'norm'.

Edited September 11, 2022 by Solar Legion

[Aishagain]

1 hour ago, xDancingStarx said:

No, it's not. Every game that I know has the option "Frame limiter" and "V-Sync". This is nothing unique to SL, at all. These options are also very much essential.

You see...there's the fundamental misunderstanding.  SL is not played solely  by gamers that know how their rigs work.  It is also embraced by folk that otherwise might not have known much more than how to turn a computer on and send an email.  I wasn't much different myself 15 years ago when I first explored this virtual world (via On Rez and some sort of CSI game).  We never stop learning but we do need the complexities explained now and then.

Edited September 11, 2022 by Aishagain

[xDancingStarx]

58 minutes ago, Ezbeharra said:

Normal people don't think about this stuff

I don't think that your definition of "normal" meets the year 2022's standards. 20+ years ago it may have been fine to "accuse" someone of being a nerd because they know what an FPS limiter is.

That said, an FPS limiter is useful only in specific cases. For example, if your monitor supports adaptive sync, you may not want your FPS to exceed the monitor's max. refresh rate. You don't know what that means? Then you most likely don't have a monitor with adaptive sync and don't need to care.

Also it doesn't make sense to have 200+ FPS in your skybox but it won't affect you in any noticeable way if you have.

V-Sync you will hear about immediately once you experience tearing in your game. You google tearing+game and you get bombarded with search results that tell you what V-Sync is. If you don't notice the tearing then you don't need to care about V-Sync either, or it's enabled by default.

There is no problem here.

Edited September 11, 2022 by xDancingStarx

[Solar Legion]

3 minutes ago, Aishagain said:

You see...there's the fundamental misunderstanding.  SL is not played solely  by gamers that know how their rigs work.  It is also embraced by folk that otherwise might not have known much more than how to turn a computer on and send an email.  I wasn't much different myself 15 years ago when I first explored this virtual world (via On Rez and some sort of CSI game).  We never stop learning but we do need the complexities explained now and then.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with knowing how your computer works.

Nor is there much explanation needed for the majority of functions - way back in the old Windows 3.11 days, (personal anecdote here) I started poking at some settings just to see what they did. Yes, a few broke things but one could often go back to the defaults rather quickly (as well as learning to ensure you have a backup of your stable settings as a precaution) and having a deeper understanding was never required. Fast forward to today and that practice - ingrained - pays off at times.

I don't need to know the intricacies for a number of the settings - I just need to either know their effects or poke the setting to learn the effects.

Yes, there are some settings that are best left alone (for varied reasons) and one should ask around if one is uncertain of major breakage. Nothing wrong with doing so! Bit problematic to show the sort of attitude that was presented though or to make the assumption that your experience is the norm.

In the case of any laptop device, an abundance of caution should be used as they simply do not have proper/adequate cooling for the majority of models, often charging a bit much for "gaming" setups when such setups (in terms of heat dissipation) should be the standard. Portable computing has come a long way ... Apparently however, the majority of laptop manufacturers are still behind the curve.

As an aside to that above: a roomie recently got a steam Deck (best model out there) and grabbed FS off of Flathub to install. After doing a bit of poking to get the Keybindings set up for use on it, it works quite well. That is an example of portable gaming/computing done well.

[Jackson Redstar]

this argument back and forth reminds me of the days I worked as a UI designer for a major corp - and how we would always kinda laugh when developers thought they could design a UI. Always turned out to be a UI only other developers would possibly understand

[xDancingStarx]

20 minutes ago, Jackson Redstar said:

this argument back and forth

There is no argument back and forth. The complaint was that people don't understand what these options mean, and in response it was said that these are advanced options that you don't need to care about beyond their default settings (as it is the case with MANY of the other non graphics related options in Firestorm.) It's also not possible to make this any "easier" as these settings are very situational. This is why you find them in every game.

Edited September 11, 2022 by xDancingStarx

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, Aishagain said:

You see...there's the fundamental misunderstanding.  SL is not played solely  by gamers that know how their rigs work.  It is also embraced by folk that otherwise might not have known much more than how to turn a computer on and send an email.  I wasn't much different myself 15 years ago when I first explored this virtual world (via On Rez and some sort of CSI game).  We never stop learning but we do need the complexities explained now and then.

That would be me, too.  The first games I played on the computer were Freddy Fish and Spy Fox with my son.   I've never played any type of game even remotely like SL or any of the other games most people play.    I'm a fairly intelligent person but unless something is relevant to what I'm doing, I don't much look into it.  Vsync being one of those things I'd never heard mentioned other than here.   Honestly, if I don't know what something is or what it does, I leave it alone.

[Jackson Redstar]

1 hour ago, xDancingStarx said:

. This is why you find them in every game.

The first mistake in designing a UI would to be assume all users are 'gamers' LOL