The Firestorm team released a new version of the popular Firestorm viewer (6.4.12.62831) on Wednesday 9th December. This latest version comes with the full release of EEP – Environment Enhancement Project, camera presets, some redesigned UI panels and functionality within the viewer. Firestorm 6.4.12 brings the viewer with the lab’s 6.4.11 viewer code base.
- “As per our 3-version rule, we will be blocking version 6.2.4.57588 and our recent EEP Public Beta from accessing the SL grid in 3 weeks’ time”.
It’s been some time since the last release because the Firestorm team have been working hard on adding the changes, fixes and features. Hopefully there will be more regular Firestorm releases during 2021. For me the Firestorm Viewer is still my favourite and the one I use the most.
* Check out the release notes here
Here are some of the highlights of this new version of the Firestorm Viewer.. .
HIGHLIGHT REEL!
The Firestorm 6.4.12 EEP release brings us to parity with the Linden Lab Viewer 6.4.11 codebase.
The main Linden Lab features included in this release are:
- EEP! Environmental Enhancement Project, including many EEP bug fixes since the Firestorm 6.4.5 EEP Beta release.
EEP is a set of environmental enhancements (designed to replace Windlight XML settings) to control the water and sky environments seen in Second Life and provide a wide range of additional/new capabilities for region owners, parcel owners and general users. It represents a fundamental shift in how environment settings are used and applied.- Camera Presets—Allow users to create custom camera presets within the viewer to suit particular needs, and then save them. This means, for example, you can now have a camera position for general exploring, another suitable for combat games, another for building, and so on—all of which can easily be accessed and used at any time.
- Mesh uploader improvements contributed to Linden Lab by Firestorm.
Cosmetic changes include:
- Upgrade to preview resolution to 1024×1024
- Scalable preview
- Fixed display of colors in preview
- Adjustment of colors to better correlate to in world (yellow frame of mesh, blue tint physics)
- Rearranged UI elements to give more space for the preview even when not scaled up.
Informational changes include:- Two new boxes: cost breakdown and physics breakdown. These provide access to information that has always been available to the viewer from the upload costs update message but were not shown to the user.
Firestorm-specific features included in this update
- The French language translation has been added back.
- RestrainedLove API updated to RLV v3.3.3 / RLVa v2.3.0.62831.
- Updated the pose-stand animations to work with bento bones.
- Attachment points of attachments are now shown in the Appearance window, wearing tab.
- A new option to allow double-click walk/teleport action to scripted objects: Prefs -> Move & View -> Movement -> Allow double-click action on scripted objects.
- A new setting, Dynamic Texture Memory, which allows the viewer to use more than 2GB of texture memory.
Dynamic Texture Memory only works on 64-bit viewers with at least 512MB VRAM and GPUs supporting either atimeminfo or nxmeminfo vendor-specific OpenGL extensions. It will allow using all currently available VRAM, or at least the value specified in minimum viewer texture memory capped at physical VRAM, minus VRAM reserve for allocating textures. That value minus cache reserve is the texture memory available for textures actually rendered. Preferences -> Graphics -> Hardware Settings.
Here are the OpenSim highlights in this release..
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Easy grid entry. You can now paste a grid URI directly into the login box and the grid will be locally added to the user’s grid list.
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A welcome change to the grid list behavior. For many years it has been enabled by default for the OpenSim build, but if a user were to install both viewers side by side there was a chance that the grid list could become disabled. The viewer now forces the grid list to be available on every startup of the OpenSim build. There is an option to disable this for grids that really need/want to restrict external grid access (though frankly, firewalls are a far better choice).
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Another change that—while it affects both SL and OpenSim—seems to generate more noise and heat in OpenSim, is object contents caching. This is now “fixed” so that when editing an object with large numbers of items inside, the viewer will not refresh every time you close and reopen the edit. Please note though, this does not change the fact that the object contents fetch protocol is extremely poor; this means that whenever the contents update, you will still have to endure the long wait. There may be some news on that in the future but it requires server changes as well as viewer.
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Fixed “My Suitcase” sometimes missing from inventory.
What do you think of this latest release ?
Daniel Voyager 