The new BPR Firestorm. (The first impressions:) LOOOVE.

It feels like turning 21, Second Life has finally reached maturity. It can now adopt its own children and drink hardened spirits, in addition to only taking part in creating X-rated movies as a teen. To celebrate this momentous achievement, the Firestorm team released a new update, the BPR Firestorm Viewer. Now. I haven’t yet had the chance to play with the BPR too much – I modified a mirror to get a reflection for it, see? – but I am certain it’s going to be a fun learning curve. I mean, it took me ages to even try specular and normal maps in my creations, but now I love them… So eventually.

Faster with hilarious glitches

But what I didn’t anticipate was that the new viewer is actually faster than the old one. Scenes that would take visible time to load on my somewhat aged Dell G7, a lower-end of the Dell spectrum gaming laptop, now load in a snap. (My Dell was fantastic when new and allowed me to run literal circles around people at Fogs a few years ago, but it is showing age now.) I can tell what the FS team meant by “single-threaded” vs. “multi-threaded” without even understanding much of the tech talk. Everything now loads at the same time, as it used to first have to load the mesh and then apply textures with a painstaking delay.

That said, I’ve run into some glitches. My brothel on Zindra rotates around its own z-axis about 10 times back and fort like a pendulum before finally settling down when teleporting in – granted, I haven’t seen the same problem with anything else yet… And only when I go pick up something (what was that code for the security central plugin?) from my main region to return back to Zindra in a minute.

My laptop runs cooler than before.

Interestingly enough, the Dell G7 has a type flaw of over-heating. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to having it burst in flames in my face with an update to Firestorm but I figured I’ll try it anyway.

It’s still not COOL by any means, but it doesn’t literally burn my fingers anymore. *cough* Albeit, the weather in Australia is more favorable now, Second Life in Aussie summer heat with a Dell G7 wasn’t exactly what one would like to do – laptop burn marks on one’s thighs where a tan should be have never been in fashion yet. Maybe next year. You all just haven’t thought about it yet.

(I haven’t burned myself with it – but that’s because I’m sensible enough not to put it on my bare thighs.)

I could give you actual degrees Celsius if I had measured the heat recently and had some recollection what it was. The end result, however, is the kind of “honey you’re burning up” -mommy kind of knowledge.

Running two instances seems to be a bit much, tho.

I have an alt account or two as I tend to like to create MFM-type seats (that I’ve got 0 rezzed atm for a reason or another,) and I used to be able to run even 4 instances of Firestorm side-by-side. (5 instances with lowered graphics.) Now, only 2 seems to be a bit too much to ask.

This is hardly a big problem, logging other avis in with Speedlight.io is perfectly acceptable when adjusting animations, but it is sometimes helpful to have the access to the other avi’s full controls for testing purposes.

I currently have two instances running, Photoshop, Discord, and I’m writing a blog post without too much drama, but my second Firestorm runs with lowered graphics. I don’t think I would have difficulty starting another program or two to boot, but another Firestorm instance would be a bit much.

The exposure setting is going to be another big mind-f***.

While I love the new exposure setting theoretically, it really needs to be in the Quick Settings and it will create problems. When creators adjust their exposure setting and create scenes, environments, clothes, skins, and materials for their preferences, the outcome is going to be a thousand different visuals for the rest of us. So we will be going back and forth to the exposure setting a lot, and it should be in the Quick Preferences -window, but seems not to be.

Further, creators that don’t notice this will create a mismatch of outcomes and it may not be pretty. It would be cool if the exposure setting would reset to 1 every time the user enters edit mode for anything, and then adjust to the user’s preferences when they exit the edit mode.

The framerate.

I haven’t really cared about the framerate much lately. I figured as long as it stays above 10 FPS, I don’t usually notice anything weird.

With this laptop, it has usually stayed in the 70 mark, but I stopped monitoring it when I figured it’s really just a vanity metric. Now, I’ve had to turn it back on as I notice a slight “slideshow effect” every now and again. And sure enough, the FPS have fallen near or under 10. That’s a bit… Worrying considering the kind of laptop I’m working on. My previous Toshiba frequently ran under 10 FPS, and crashed at the feat of trying to walk at Fogs, but that thing was LITERALLY glued back together with super glue before I finally decided to cough up the money for a new one… And it wasn’t a gaming laptop to start with.

I don’t know if my location in Australia has something to do with the fallen frame rate. My Internet speed should not be an issue with the Google speed test.

That said, a gaming laptop KNOWS NOTHING if it can’t run Second Life comfortably. I know gamers that think their laptops are ace, but once they install Second Life… They’ve got no game.

Still, the good thing is that Second Life is a slow game, it’s not supposed to be a speed-monster. We have time to wait for our scenes to load and our priorities are very different to that of the average gamer. Our creators go for other things than speed-optimized content…. Even if half of them knew how to optimize, that is.

But gamers expect to see speed, and typically, they don’t. They expect to see professionally created content, and obviously, Second Life is not that kind of an environment. While some creators are absolutely pro… Some very much are not. (And that’s the beauty of the platform, not it’s weakness, too. But to appreciate it, you cannot enter thinking it’s an EA Games -environment. It’s the Internet in 3D, with all manner of crazos throwing content at you. :p)

And yes, I keep calling it “a game” because I’m not embarrassed to consider myself a playah. :p