Monday, March 17, 2014

We Upgraded To The Latest Firestorm

June 2013 saw us move from Phoenix to Firestorm as the new Server Side Baking made Phoenix unusable.

Adventurous early adopters (whom I privately refer to as “unpaid beta testers”) have since then jumped on the Firestorm Beta for the lovely materials and assorted new features. Good for them, but we left that one alone.

The Firestorm team released (to the wild!) the new version, 4.6.1.40478, on March 12th and we installed it on March 15th - nobody can say we’re lagging behind this time!

So for the last three days lelo and I have been enjoying the new Firestorm. In for a penny, in for a pound, we went for the 64bit version.

Once again, the word is all good. Very fast everything: rezzing, teleports, inventory - this may be the HTTP network improvements mentioned on the Firestorm viewer blog .

Materials, of course, was the one big thing we were waiting for. All I can say is “ooo, shiny!” ;) Steph gave a gentle chuckle as I was finally able to see DeVicious leather glisten properly.

The lighting issue also seems to be gone. Facelights had turned into 500-watt flood lamps in the previous FS, but that resolved itself with this upgrade.

Backing up settings, removing everything and doing a clean install, then restoring settings meant I didn’t wrestle with the same configuration questions I hit in June.

The new FS did poke me to get the latest NVIDIA driver - I’m a late adopter there too. So, all good - call it spring cleaning.

Liquid mesh is also included in this release, and we already have designers calling us privately with liquid mesh items.

We’re guessing this version will spread fast (although not quite the way the sudden death of Phoenix forced everyone to migrate) but with its great new features (and some terrific UI cleanup I won’t itemize to avoid boring you) we’ll certainly encourage anyone to upgrade.

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