Firestorm – Ciaran Laval

January 23, 2015

SLGO Is Worth A Dabble But Snapshots Are Easier With A Normal Client

Ok first of all, as I’m a great believer in ethics in Virtual World Blogging I will declare from the outset that I have no connection with SL Go, or OnLive. At the moment, I’m on my iMac, which isn’t new and I’m struggling to find the bloody hash symbol. This reminds me of the time I was in the United States and phoning home and the phone told me to press the pound sign, which confused the living daylights out of me as there was no £ sign on the telephone, eventually I realised they meant the old pound sign for weight, which is #. Aha alt + 3 on a Mac. Ok, so #Theonlywayisethics

Now on with the show!

I logged into SL Go from OnLive for the first time in ages. This is largely due to the problems I’m having with AMD graphics in Second Life. The results, were quite staggering on my mid 2007 iMac. Now, wait, I hear you say. A 2007 iMac won’t have AMD graphics, this is true, but I was downstairs watching Cambridge United v Manchester United in the FA Cup.

Anyway, the first thing I noticed was that my experience of the wonderful Escapades Island was vastly improved because all of the textures seemed to load right away.

Wait wait wait! You can’t save Snapshots to disk with SL Go! This is true too, the images in this post were taken on my PC with the regular Second Life client, but here’s the thing, whilst I’m waiting for scenes to rez on my PC, I see the textures loading, they turn from grey and lifeless to being filled in. This doesn’t happen when I’m using SL Go.

However I do like my snapshots. So the ideal scenario for me is to be able to use SL Go and a regular Second Life or TPV client and I’d imagine a lot of people are the same.

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December 19, 2014December 21, 2014

Firestorm Casts A Mighty Shadow Over The Official SL Client When It Comes To Photography

I’ve recently returned to using the official Second Life client. Well first of all, let me recap, there was a stage when the official client was the only client I really liked using, I was wary of those third party clients, despite all their bells and whistles.

I’d tried them, I didn’t get on with them and then one day I tried Firestorm, and quite frankly I never looked back when it came to taking photographs in Second Life. The photo tools, the sheer amount of windlight settings, I was as happy as Larry playing around with these and ramping up my graphics for the right shot, moving the time of day slider to cast shadows. Awesome sauce.

Then one day I noticed my AMD graphic drivers were a tad out of date and updated them, and Firestorm made a very sad face at me. However I saw some light on the horizon, a new version of AMD graphics drivers were released and I updated again. Alas, this was a terrible mistake as Inara Pey pointed out. However the investigative Inara Pey also points out that there may be hope on the horizon.

The thing is that may my main issue with Firestorm was not regarding rigged Mesh, well it is now, but the issue I had with Firestorm after updating my graphics drivers was that if I set my settings to Ultra, my scene looked like something rendered on the Sinclair Spectrum.

So I returned to official Second Life client and that’s where my head scratching started.

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December 17, 2014

SL GO Embraces Firestorm

An Image Should Be Here — SL GO Comes To Firestorm

Last Friday’s Drax Files Radio hour is well worth a listen because it featured Cubey “Not the Grandfather Of Aviation In Second Life” Terra. However it also featured something else, Draxtor Despres and Jo Yardley dropping hints about a big secret regarding SL GO from Onlive.

I’d actually forgotten all about this until I saw a post on New World Notes : SL Go Streaming Now Available Through PC/Mac Versions of Firestorm, Second Life’s Most Popular Viewer. SL GO can now be used with Firestorm as the client. This is further explained by the Firestorm team themselves in their own blog post : Firestrom On SL GO!

It should be noted that SL GO is not yet available on mobile devices with Firestorm. However that is promised for the future. Wait a minute, isn’t SL GO aimed at mobile devices such as Tablets? Well yes and no. SL GO can also be used to bring more life to Second Life on older PC/Mac hardware. The Firestorm blog post explains how this all works, I’ll quote some of that here but you really need to read the whole blog to get the full picture :

Onlive is essentially a streaming service. They host Firestorm and the SL Viewer on their many servers and stream video of a viewer’s interface and graphics to your computer screen while relaying your key and mouse inputs back to the viewer. This allows you to use graphically intensive games and applications without weighting down your own computer. In many ways it is like a remote desktop allowing you to manipulate the computer you are connected to with your own computer or mobile device. And since the computers on which OnLive hosts Firestorm are very high-end machines, you can run SL with full ultra graphics, shadows and everything without the drop in performance that highly detailed graphics usually cause!

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December 3, 2012December 3, 2012

Firestorm Now With Improved Photo Tools And Legacy Search

Inara Pey is the viewer release Princess of all goodness when it comes to looking at viewers. I’m more of a traditionalist and generally stick with Official Linden Lab viewers. However something caught my eye about the latest release of Firestorm (4.3.1.31155). Inara took a look at the beta release last month.

The things that caught my eye about this release were the legacy viewer 1 search and the photo tools. Although there’s a hell of a lot more to this release than that, for full info read the release notes. Now first things first, when I first installed Firestorm, I couldn’t move because there’s a preference for wasd to control chat, not movement. This needed to be changed for me to even get going:

Chatting away to myself wasn’t much fun, do people prefer the default to be local chat for wasd? Anyway it was a simple change once I found it, so off I went exploring.

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January 15, 2012January 15, 2012

Qarl’s Alignment Tool – This Is Why TPV’s Prosper

There’s a bit of a hoo ha about Qarl’s alignment tool being rejected by Linden Lab for implementation in the official viewer, this discussion takes place in Jira Storm 468. I’ve never used this tool, so I can’t comment on how awesome or not it is, I did try to install Firestorm last weekend but Norton 360 threw a wobbly about slplugin.exe, this is a known issue. I’m not a big fan of third party viewers (TPV’s), however this issue highlights why TPV’s are a useful community addition.

Let’s just rewind slightly to try to demonstrate why Charlar Linden isn’t acting like Darth Charlar over this issue. I recently blogged on how Blender may drop COLLADA import/export from the official release. Collada is the export tool to make Mesh items in Blender compatible with Second Life but it creates support issues for Blender as a whole. Blender have as an option thrown this over to the Blender community to fix COLLADA issues, as Sergey Sharibin explained:

“More optimistic targets would be find volunteer to pick up this stuff who will make it usable (maybe rewritting this stuff from scratch..) ”

Linden Lab’s approach to the prim alignment tool is very similar, only of course, it’s not already in the official release viewer.

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