Firestorm Mesh Release

[Arrehn Oberlander]

This is just a quick note because I haven't seen it as a thread here yet. The non-profit Phoenix/Firestorm Viewer Project has released a new public beta of the FIrestorm Viewer with mesh display support, along with a truckload of new features and bugfixes earlier this week. FIrestorm is a registered third party viewer for Second Life tracked on Linden Lab's wiki registry:

 

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory

 

This release brings a few more firsts to viewer technology, including an method of organizing your friends into groups, designed by LordGregGreg Back. There are a number of known issues with the LL 3.0.x tree that Firestorm is using that affect some popular video cards at the moment. However if you are able to run LL's viewer, Firestorm should work well for you. We hope you'll try it out and find something to enhance your SL experience.

 

Thanks, -Arrehn

[Hayley Spore]

Works wonderfully for me on Windows, but as soon as I boot into Linux I have all kinds of problem with it.

 

Much of the text on the UI is invisible (contact list, several sections of profiles, etc), I cannot start an IM with anyone and when they start one with me their name shows up as "[NAME]" while typing, and blank while not typing. Also, I do not see mesh. At all. I don't see weird donut shaped prims, just nothing at all. Much like Kirsten's viewer, which also works fine on Windows but has the same problems on my Linux installation. I'd love to tell you how Viewer3 works on Linux, but it refuses to even log me in.

I still have no idea why. I assume it's my video card, but upgrading my drivers has had no effect so far.

Gentoo Linux 64bit (Kernel 3.0.0) with a NVIDIA GTX 480 video card (driver version 280.13), for those wondering.

[Peewee Musytari]

Try switching off basic shaders & see if that makes a difference. I believe one of the inherited LL bugs is related to 400 series NVidia cards.

Rolling back the drivers to an earlier version has also been a successful workaround for some people.

[Arrehn Oberlander]

Because we heavily use the Viewer3 core rendering technology, if LL Viewer3 doesn't run well on your system, Firestorm probably won't either.

 

The linux we test on is Ubuntu 10.10, 32bit, and Fedora Core 15, 32bit. All other distributions are less well supported, your luck may vary.

 

Hope this helps!

-A

[Davoda Zarco]

Firestorm 3.0.1.22525 is working well here in Linux Ubuntu 11.04. The graphics adapter is an nVidia Geforce 8600.

 

[Kaylira]

I'm having some issues with the "blank names" problem as well, but slightly different.

 

I cleared my cache yesterday after not having done it in a while. When I logged back in, every single one of my friends names in my Contact List was blank. I could double click their name and an IM would pop up, and their name was visible on the IM Tabs, but not in my Contact list. The only way I could see a name on my list was if the person had gone Offline or come Online.

 

Any fix to that? SL works perfectly fine on my computer, except for that little bug. I've got a NVIDIA GeForce 260M if that helps All updated drivers. 

[Rhys Goode]

I've seen this happen from time to time over the years, even with viewer 1.  A relog has always cleared the issue for me.