The demand for a Bento-capable Firestorm Viewer has been overwhelming, to say the least! With over 8,000 people in our preview group running it, is widely regarded as faster by testers and is expected to be a rock-solid update. For those who don’t know about it, Bento is Linden Lab’s latest and greatest improvement to Second Life that enables a whole new realm of possibilities and realism for avatars. Because it adds dozens of new joints to the Second Life avatar skeleton, we can now have ultrarealistic moving tails, ears, wings, fingers, facial expressions and so much more! For more info on Bento, check out Torley Linden’s Video or Linden Lab’s announcement or read from the many posts about it, including at Inara Pey’s blog. Even if you have no intention of using Bento-enabled content or animations, you will need this viewer in order to see it properly on others.

But this Firestorm Viewer update isn’t just about Bento. It’s also packed with lots of RLVa fixes, new features, performance improvements, bug fixes and so much more! There are some highlights below, but first a quick reminder: If you’re currently using version 4.7.5, you have three weeks to update to any of our more recent releases (5.0.1 recommended and supported; 4.7.9 and 4.7.7 permitted) before your viewer will be blocked. Versions 4.7.7 and 4.7.9 will continue being usable for now.

And now the 5.0.1 release highlights!

Visual Outfit Browser (VOB) feature from Linden Lab: VOB allows you to use the Appearance floater to capture/upload/select images of your outfits and save them alongside the outfits in a new Outfit Gallery tab.



New Avatar Render Settings feature under World menu: Lists all avatars you have chosen to fully render or never render. Right-clicking on one or multiple avatars allows direct changing of the setting.



Improved Asset Blacklist: Temporarily blocked objects are now shown in the Asset Blacklist floater so they can be removed. Fixed the crash when leaving an area where many objects were blacklisted. Added an option to rerender temporarily derendered objects after teleport or after end of session or to perform manual rerendering via the Asset Blacklist floater. Added button to clear all temporarily derendered objects to the Asset Blacklist floater.



New option to log autoaccepted inventory to nearby chat: Preferences -> Privacy -> General -> Log automatically accepted inventory items to nearby chat.



Status bar improvements: Added an FPS meter and seconds to the clock.



New option to render friends only: World -> Show Friends Only.



You can now resize the Movement controls: Avatar -> Move Controls.



Attachments ghosting after teleport fixes: Ghosted attachments are those that appear attached, but others don’t see them. This fix will not 100% eliminate the bug (that will need a server-side fix), but the frequency of the bug should be much reduced. For when things do go wrong, added a new “Refresh Attachments” feature — in cases where an attachment is ghosted, it will attempt to reattach it: Avatar -> Avatar Health -> Refresh Attachments.



RLV updated to RLVa-2.1.0 and many RLV bug fixes.

Project VLC from Linden Lab: QuickTime has been replaced with LibVLC support for the Windows and Linux versions of the viewer, as Apple recently announced they are no longer supporting QuickTime for Windows and will not be offering security updates.



Firestorm is now DPI-aware — no more tiny user interface and font on high-resolution monitors.

New font! — Google Noto: Preferences -> User Interface -> Font.



For more information, you can see our RELEASE NOTES or have a read from Inara’s summary here.

Since this is such a significant release, and since it merges us up with LL’s new 5.0 Bento viewer release, we’ve decided to change our version numbering convention to match LL’s moving forward. This version is 5.0.1.52150, and from now on the first two digits of our versions (in this case 5.0) will reflect the version of the LL viewer it is in parity with. This should help you identify what we’re up to date with on the LL side of things.*

If this all sounds confusing, don’t worry — the only thing you need to know is that higher numbers are newer, and we are keeping up with LL features and functionality while maintaining an ultrastable, feature-rich viewer for accessing Second Life and other virtual worlds, just for you!

Sincerely,

The Firestorm Team!

P.S. Hope to see you all at our Christmas Party on the 18th! Live performances and great gifts as always, announcement to follow later this week!

* The third number, such as the 1 in 5.0.1, will be specific to Firestorm (odd numbers are used for release versions, and even numbers are internal and prerelease builds such as alphas and betas). The last set of numbers, such as the 52150, reflects the revision from our repository.