The big news this weekend announced by Jessica Lyon during a recent Phoenix office hour with the SL community is that the Phoenix Viewer support will be ending on Monday 31st December 2012. Apparently the Phoenix Viewer will then be removed from the SL third-party directory and Phoenix links will be removed from the Phoenix Official Blog. In 2013 Firestorm Viewer will be the default popular third party viewer and more new developments will continue to happen.
The reason for why Phoenix Viewer support will be ending is because Linden Lab will be rolling out server-side avatar baking in 2013 which should be interesting. TPVs have been told about this 2013 avatar baking roll out and hopefully the deployment will go without any major issues.
It seems like the server side baking rollout is at it’s final stages now with a timeline of 8 weeks according to Oz Linden via the Open Source Mailing List recently.
Oz Linden (Scott Lawrence)
to opensource-dev
For any of you developing viewers that are not in the TPV Directory and
so didn’t get the notice there….We have now made available the code for our upcoming server side baking
changes – you will need to update to be compatible with this in order
for users to see avatars correctly once the server side change is rolled
out to the main grid (some time > 8 weeks from now, but no date has been
set yet).See
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Project_Sunshine-Server_Side_Appearance
for information on this new code, and watch it for updates.
Tonya Souther blogs about this roll out here…
As Oz said in the meeting, the clock is now ticking. We asked for at least two months’ notice, and yesterday we got that. LL would like to roll the code out to the grid in February, but they’ll work with TPV developers to make sure we all have had the code and a good chance to implement it before they actually roll it out.
History of the Phoenix Viewer
- Transition from Emerald controversy to Phoenix in September 2010
- Phoenix Viewer added to The Third-Party Viewer Directory list in September 2010
- Phoenix Viewer Beta 2 in July 2011
- 40 groups enabled on Phoenix Viewer in January 2011
- Phoenix Project turned one years old in September 2011
- Phoenix Viewer Beta 2 with Mesh Support in September 2011
- Phoenix classes started in 2011
- New changes to TPV policy & Phoenix TPV policy meeting in late February 2012
- Phoenix Viewer support ends 31st December 2012
What do you think about this major announcement and will you be switching to Firestorm if not already?
Daniel Voyager 