Sunday, July 14, 2013

Server Side Baking Blues?




Going from Phoenix to Singularity SSB?
For information about customising FIRESTORM see the Resources Tab above, 3rd story down

So you have made the leap from Phoenix to Firestorm?   Well done you!

If you haven't.... or you cannot get to grips with Firestorm despite my wonderful article in "Resources", then Singularity with SSB may well be the cure for what ails you!



Firestorm is very much like Phoenix when set to the Phoenix mode.  You can customise it even more closely with my settings, but it does still lack some functionality that was enjoyed in Phoenix.
Little things, but annoying things.. Keyword alerts not working in background, UUID not supported in Estate and Local access listing, bad highlighting in edit, strange editor for scripting, Radar needing to be clicked 3 times to make it alphabetical, inability to view/moderate group chat by who has spoken most recently, non proportional tab widths in chat etc etc.

Singularity is the closest viewer you will get to the old Phoenix viewer.  It is virtually identical and the only differences I have spotted are on the radar button, otherwise it seems the same, which is hardly surprising considering both viewers were forked from Snowglobe.

However, they both share the same bug, which is the inability to point their settings away from:
C:\users\yourname\appdata\roaming\secondlife and try as I might I cannot get phoenix to point to "phoenix" and singularity to point to "singularity" in the directory above, it seems that "secondlife" is hardcoded into the settings.

It doesn't matter too much, unless you use both viewers!   If you use both viewers, expect some strange results as one will corrupt the "per user" settings on the other, or you will find Singularity does all the logon stuff and the very instant you think you have arrived in-world, it quits to desktop.   Phoenix on the other hand will dump many of the tweaks you have added, like keyword alerts, auto-responses etc.

My advice is to use either Phoenix or Singularity and NEVER both on your system at a time.

If you are moving from Phoenix to Singularity (or want to give Singularity a thorough road test) here's how:

Remove the desktop shortcut.. You don't want to undo all your hard work by accidently launching Phoenix!

Since Phoenix is now defunct as it will not support SSB and Singularity supports Server Side Baking, my work around was to rename the directory to C:\users\yourname\appdata\roaming\secondlife-phoenix to mothball my old settings and chats (which I can copy across later).   Now on starting Singularity, I can be assured that only Singularity is using the directory C:\users\yourname\appdata\roaming\secondlife thus preserving my settings from corrupting.

If for any reason I find that Singularity is unworkable for me and I want to return to Phoenix from where I left off, I can safely delete C:\users\yourname\appdata\roaming\secondlife  and rename C:\users\yourname\appdata\roaming\secondlife-phoenix back to C:\users\yourname\appdata\roaming\secondlife

By following the steps in the Firestorm guide (See the Resources Tab at the top of this page), you can also copy across the old Phoenix fonts and make the viewer absolutely identical!

I am told that you can copy the language files from Phoenix too if English is not your native language.

Happy fiddling!

PS: If rezzing is slow and grey forever, go to the Network tab and uncheck "Use HTTP for Textures"

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