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.

Now as I said, they have legacy search in this release. I thought Linden Lab were phasing this out, but there it was and working too, although it’s not apparently fully functional yet according to the release notes.

Arguably search has never improved upon legacy viewer 1 search, I mean you used to find things, you’d find plenty of gaming too but I’ve seen very little evidence that inworld search has ever improved on the legacy search system, despite Linden Lab’s best efforts to improve it. This was just one of those things, if you were listing your parcel in search, you’d be able to find it easily, whether others would was a different matter but I like the concept of a search that doesn’t include keyword stemming and gave people the chance to add a degree of uniqueness to their descriptions to get found.

Then there are the new photo tools, n0w I’m not a SL photographer, but these tools, even to a novice like me, are fun and easy to play aroud with:

You can quickly change your windlight settings to get different views and for advanced photographers, there’s a plethora of choices on what you can change. I decided it was best not to change too much as I didn’t want to confuse myself, which is easily done, but I decided to photograph some wildlife:

I decided to photograph some buildings:

I decided to photograph The Goblin King Statue, although admittedly from a safe distance:

Now for someone like me, who despairs at wobbliness when trying to change camera settings, this was fun. Will this be enough to keep me going back to Firestorm? I don’t know, I really am a traditionalist but I like this release of Firestorm, it was relatively easy to get on with and seemed to work fine, so I’m sure I’ll use it for a while yet and see what quirks it throws at me.

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