To cut straight to the chase, the news is all good.
Everything’s working, and unexpectedly, Firestorm needs a lot less juice to run than Phoenix ever did.
I didn’t even use the Phoenix compatibility mode, just dove right in. The Starlight Silver Blue skin is a joy to see, and being able to set inactive windows at 100% opacity is a big thing for me. You’ll find that one in Colors, Floating Window Opacity, Inactive.
(Seriously, who sat there and thought “Let’s make the inactive window just transparent enough to be inconvenient to read but not transparent enough to see what’s behind” ?)
The “Add alpha” thing is probably going to be worth the price of admission, I’m looking forward to using that.
In the “bad things I was worrying about that didn’t materialize” series, repopulating my inv took a *lot* less time than it did in Phoenix.
One setting you’ll want to turn on if you’re like me is “Show toasts in front of other windows”, in Preferences, User Interface, Toasts.
“Toast” is apparently the name for a pop-up window; in the case that bothered me, one that has a yes-no-ignore set of buttons. It went behind my Inventory window, which is not the behavior I want from a popup ;) Lelo figured it out quickly, so all is well.
What else? I had to change Chat, General, Pressing letter keys: to “Affects movement” rather than “Starts local chat”, the default, which is not properly speaking an insane setting, but just not the one I’m used to.
I think I’m fairly representative of the hold-out fringe that was still running a V1 style viewer, so the smooth transition to Firestorm should be good news to the others.
The Firestorm blog reports some 60,000 of us still using Phoenix recently; a non-trivial figure which I had unconsciously assumed to be much, much lower.
The end must be near, has anyone seen 4 old guys on horseback going by? Did it rain frogs? Locusts anyone?
It finally happened: Mistress waved goodbye to Phoenix and stepped over to Firestorm.
I was running Firestorm already on my notebook, couldn’t find a Phoenix installer after my last reinstall, i’m not a thrill seeker or beta tester when it comes to software.
And have done the move to Firestorm a week ago, and after i reported to Mistress that the water is fine, she jumped in with me. *winks*
Turns out Mistress is a lot more observant than me when it comes to software.
Where i mumble a bit about the stand button that has been moved to the movement controls, Mistress is noticing a more fisheye look to the world or a lower processor load.
Shows you who is the software connoisseur of the two of us. *smiles*
So all is well, even if we’ll be busy finding lost buttons and hidden pop ups for a few weeks to come, the simple fact that we can add alpha’s and that mesh is fully supported is well worth the move.
Next, server side baking, hopefully group chat and an end to lag (or is that too much to ask). *winks*
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