Summer fun and fixes – Firestorm 6.6.14Where did those months go? Summer is here (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, at least) and it’s been far too long since the last Firestorm update. We are happy to announce that the latest Firestorm Release is now available for
download in the usual place.
As this has been over six months in the making, you can expect many fixes and feature enhancements.
Inara Pey’s customary in-depth review has more detail about the features, fixes and improvements, while the full blow-by-blow details can be found on
Whirly’s comprehensive release notes page.
Supported platforms:
All of our official builds are created using GitHub build servers; as such, we track supported platforms closely and cannot build for out-of-date platforms. If you run your systems on out-of-support platforms, you may find that Firestorm no longer runs for you.
Our current builds are built on the following platforms
- Windows Server 2022 (compatible with Windows 10 & 11)
- Mac Os: Big Sur (MacOS 11)
- Linux: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Safety and security reminder
Please only download the Firestorm Viewer from the
official Firestorm viewer download page. Do not trust anyone who asks you to download from their website; this includes OpenSim grid operators (who really should know better) and, of course, any sites that try to look like our official pages. Be wary of any location that asks you to log in before downloading. Firestorm will never ask you to do this. See our
recent blog post on phishing; phishing happens both in-world and on the web.
A new viewer release always triggers the
paranoia of Anti-Virus (AV) software because it shows up as not previously seen in their databases. Assuming that you trust us, you can safely ignore the warnings (it goes without saying that if you don’t trust us, you should probably not be using our viewer!). This advice only applies to the viewer downloaded from our website. We will not support any viewer that has been downloaded from anywhere else.
End-of-life notice for 32-bit Windows users.
Following Linden Lab’s decision to cease support for 32-bit Windows builds, this may be the last Firestorm release that offers full functionality for Second Life. Only 2% of current users run 32-bit Windows Firestorm builds, and while we will not remove 32-bit builds as long as they are easily maintained, the time is fast approaching when the maintenance overhead of supporting this legacy platform will be more than we can justify,
More specifically, the forthcoming PBR viewer requires an updated Havok physics library which Linden Lab provide under a sub-license. As LL will no longer be producing this library for any 32-bit viewers, we, in turn,
cannot support a Havok build.
If (and when) other more fundamental libraries on which the viewer depends remove 32-bit support, we will have no choice but to remove the 32-bit viewer altogether from future releases.
What does this mean for you?
If you are one of the increasingly small number of 32-bit users,
you will need to upgrade your PC to enable you to run a 64-bit viewer. Most people using the 32-bit viewer will be doing so deliberately; usually, it is to limit the amount of RAM used because their machine has minimal resources. If this is the case, upgrading your RAM may be the most straightforward option. However, keep in mind that as Second Life has a roadmap to improve performance and graphics quality in the future, weaker hardware is unlikely to be able to keep up with future releases – so if your current PC is older than 5-6 years and certainly if it is ten years or more out of date, then it may be better to invest in a new machine rather than attempt piecemeal upgrades. At present, the viewer can run with 4GB RAM; however, a typical high-detail region with more than a few avatars in it will quickly push the viewer beyond that memory and cause all manner of issues (from slowdowns to crashes).
Is this the Peanut Butter thing?
Nope, this is not PBR (actually Physically Based Rendering), but Linden Lab has been working hard on preparing this major update, and we expect to have an early access (pre-Beta even) version for creators, builders and anyone who wants to see the future (and help debug it). If you want to help us and Linden Lab find as many bugs as possible before the official release, please
join the Phoenix Firestorm Preview group and watch for notices.
Retiring older viewers
Per our normal 3-version rule,
Firestorm version 6.5.6 will be blocked in 3 weeks.
Key changes from the Lab
While busily focused on the next-generation graphics viewer (PBR), Linden Lab has still been tirelessly fixing bugs and releasing Maintenance updates. Firestorm 6.6.14 merges in all of those releases since our previous update, which aligns us with the Linden Lab 6.6.13 release viewer (also known as Maint-T).
All Maintenance updates include a host of bug fixes and improvements. The following list highlights just a few key updates:
- Maint-P – Preferences, Positions and Paste fixes – introduced the ability to hear sound and media from the avatar position, not just from the camera. It also introduced the Firestorm feature for sorting by attachment point, making the feature universal – see Alpha Blend Issues – get them sorted.
- Maint Q – Quality Contributions – Focused on Quality of Life changes for UI improvements and EEP fixes.
- Maint R – Resident Inspired Improvements. Are you fed up with entering a group chat mid-conversation? Recent chat history is now displayed when first opening a group chat. Meanwhile, estate owners can now choose to restrict the access of scripted agents (AKA bots) to their regions.
- Maint S – Superlative Supports – A bumper set of translations for 6 of the LL-supported languages.
- Maint T – Maintenance Transparent Translation – Keeping with the theme of language translation set by Maint-S, and the retirement of “Bing Translate” by Microsoft, the translation settings have been updated to support a new generation of AI-based real-time translators (full instructions in the release notes). Maint-T also saw a fix for the “show transparency” bug that was causing problems for several creators and users while addressing several other obscure transparency issues at the same time.
Firestorm-specific updates
To keep this blog post short, we won’t reiterate what is already covered in the release notes; instead, we’ll highlight some significant new features and fixes.
- This update introduces a new Stream Title Floater and track history. The stream floater is a small window that shows the artist’s name and song title of the currently playing stream.
- Using the Animation Explorer, you can now add an animation being played on your avatar to your blacklist, preventing you and anyone seeing your avatar from seeing the animation playing. You can still play the animation in local mode.
- The Asset Cache size management has been rewritten to ensure that the cache is always within the specified “max cache” size. Furthermore, it uses a more effective high/low water model to purge older items and free up space.
This release also sees the addition of Azerbaijani localization, contributed by ღ lєnnч sσulflαчєr ღ (HelenAdamson). You can find it along with the other languages in Preferences → General → Language
Our fantastic, hardworking team of translators have also provided numerous updates to keep existing translations progressing. As always, our thanks go to the following:
- German translation updates – Ansariel Hiller
- Russian translation updates –Romka Swallowtail
- Polish translation updates – PanteraPolnocy
- French translation updates – Laurent Bechir
For builders, there are several new features:
- We can now find and replace textures. Need to update all the instances of a given texture?
Build floater-> Texture Tab-> Find all has you covered; when in face select mode, this button will select all faces with the same diffuse/normal/specular texture as the texture on the selected face, making it super easy to replace all instances of a particular texture. - Strip unwanted alpha layers before texture upload. A blank alpha layer wastes resources for the viewer, can lead to unnecessary rendering issues (z-fighting) and is generally bad practice, but some tools don’t automatically remove empty channels. The viewer will now identify these and offer the option to strip out unwanted, unused channels before you upload.
Other build-related fixes include improved and cleaned-up script editing behaviour. The
local mesh floater introduced in the last release has seen many fixes and updates based on user feedback (thank you).
Area Search has been broken for a couple of releases, with fewer items being found than expected. This is primarily because of changes that make the viewer faster and leaner by minimizing the amount of redundant information the viewer has to track (such as items that are not visible). This release addresses some of this by forcing the viewer to be less aggressive with house cleaning when the area search is active. You may still need to turn on the spot to make the viewer retrieve certain items, but the overall results should be much more robust than in recent releases.
Other fixes include fixes for double-click TP not working on scripted objects.
RLVa
There has been no update to RLVa for this release. Firestorm 6.6.14 is running RestrainedLove API: RLV v3.4.3 / RLVa v2.4.2.69596
Catznip RLVa 2.4.1 Release NotesOpen Sim specific
Various fixes for profiles have been applied, addressing many of the issues resulting from the Second Life profiles update. A bug that caused your logs to fill up rapidly after visiting a Var Region has been fixed.
JIRA bug fixes
As always, JIRA is a valuable resource to track and account for the many reported bugs and issues; an extensive list is provided in the full release notes. We thank users who take the time to provide polite, complete bug reports via JIRA. A concise description of an issue and accurate, repeatable steps to recreate the problem are essential for a rapid fix.
—The Firestorm Team
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