Firestorm is a free client for 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life and various OpenSim worlds where users can create, connect and chat with others from around the world.

AyaneStorm - A fork of Firestorm for photographers

Features (so far ; some features might get merged in official Firestorm)

• Added poser from BlackDragon
• Added camera roll/tilt buttons from Blackdragon (+ key bindings) (merged in Firestorm)
• Snapshots up to 11500x11500 resolution
• AVX2 optimized build (now also in Firestorm)
• Made the Animation Speed menu easily accessible: it is no longer in Developer > Avatar > Animation Speed, it is now directly accessible in AyaneStorm > animation
• Added a "All Animations Slowed Down" menu that directly sets animations speed to the minimum (10%)
• Added a "Freeze Animations" menu in World > Animation Speed, effectively freezing all animations. Very useful for photographers!
• No longer shows the stupid ":non-potable_water:" and "fleur-de-lys" emojis when typing ":-P" or ":-D" (use package located in https://github.com/AyaneStorm/3p-emoji-shortcodes)
• Increased resolution limit to 2048x2048 for snapshot uploaded to inventory (merged in Second-Life)
• Updated OpenJPEG to 2.5.2 (for Jpeg2000 format) (Firestorm also updated to this version now)
• Fixed texture and snapshots poor upload quality with OpenJPEG (merged in Firestorm)
• Enabled "lossless" texture uploads
• New icons
• Custom login page
• Added support for WebP format, like in Alchemy
• Bigger camera controls
• Can double-click on an animation in the AO to play it (merged in Firestorm)
• Can preview profile, picks and 1st life as others would see it (merged in Firestorm)
• Can see oneself in Nearby people list, so that the people count is correct, and you can double-click on yourself to focus camera on you
• Bigger profile pictures!
• Changed location of "Drop inventory item here" in profile to a more logical one
• Additional advanced phototools by Kiss Spicoli
• Added a slider on top to change the render distance, just like in Starlight UI
• Includes latest updates from Firestorm
• Windows, macOS and Linux builds
• All builds with FMOD for audio and Kakadu for JPG2000 encoder/decoder

Quick build instructions (for Windows):

First, make sure you installed all the prerequisites software. See Windows

Build without FMOD (the simplest):

git clone https://github.com/AyaneStorm/phoenix-firestorm.git
cd phoenix-firestorm
prepare_no_fmod.bat (only the first time)
build_no_fmod.bat

Build with FMOD (more complicated): First, follow Alchemy Viewer instructions to generate the FMOD library file (you'll need Cygwin64). Then update the set_fmod_vars.bat file with correct values.

• FMOD_HASH is the MD5 hash of the FMOD file
• FMOD_URL is the location of the FMOD file (it must start with file:///)

Then type:

git clone https://github.com/AyaneStorm/phoenix-firestorm.git
cd phoenix-firestorm
prepare_with_fmod.bat  (only the first time)
build_with_fmod.bat

If you already prepared the build and want to rebuild later with another CMD window:

• Open a new CMD window
• Depending on whether you want to build with FMOD or without, type rebuild_with_fmod.bat or rebuild_no_fmod.bat so that the required variables are set again
• Then type build_with_fmod.bat or build_without_fmod.bat for each subsequent build

Kakadu build for Windows

There is absolutely no instructions anywhere for building SecondLife / Firestorm / Alchemy with Kakadu, but I managed to do it. If you're interested, do as follow:

• Acquire a Kakadu license (can't help you with this, and won't share mine, it's private, please don't ask)
• Install the Visual Studio 2019 Build Tools and optionnaly Visual Studio itself (won't work with VS2022 build tools with current Kakadu version 8.4.1)
• Install Mingw64, make sure that you can create .tar.bz2 files.
• Extract Kakadu library somewhere
• In coresys directory you'll find a VS2019 solution and project
• Set coresys VS2019 project configuration to <ConfigurationType>StaticLibrary</ConfigurationType> instead of <ConfigurationType>DynamicLibrary</ConfigurationType>
• Set linker additional dependencies to: ..\srclib_ht\Win-x86-64\kdu_ht2019R.lib;%(AdditionalDependencies) for Release ..\srclib_ht\Win-x86-64\kdu_ht2019D.lib;%(AdditionalDependencies) for Debug (It is simpler to edit that in the project properties in Visual Studio, but that's optional)
• Prepare Kakadu sources for high speed Kakadu if your license allows it (see Enabling_HT.txt in Kakadu library)
• In VS 2019 build tools, cd to Kakadu coresys folder and type: msbuild.exe coresys_2019.sln -t:coresys -p:Configuration="Release" -p:Platform="x64" for Release, or msbuild.exe coresys_2019.sln -t:coresys -p:Configuration="Debug" -p:Platform="x64" for Debug
• You'll obtain a kdu_84R.lib or a kdu_84D.lib in coresys/../../bin_x64/
• Git clone this repository: https://github.com/AyaneStorm/kdu_installable_template
• In kdu-8.4.1-windows-233220159-template directory:
  • Copy and rename kdu_84R.lib to lib/Release/kdu_x64.lib
  • Copy and rename kdu_84D.lib to lib/Debug/kdu_x64.lib
  • Copy all the .h files of Kakadu into include/ (all, not only coresys headers)
  • Copy the Kakadu license into LICENSES/
• In Mingw64, type: cd kdu-8.4.1-windows-233220159-template/ && tar -cvjSf kdu-8.4.1-windows-233220159.tar.bz2 * mv kdu-8.4.1-windows-233220159.tar.bz2 ../ && cd .. && md5sum kdu-8.4.1-windows-233220159.tar.bz2
• You should obtain a kdu-8.4.1-windows-233220159.tar.bz2 file and its MD5 checksum (keep that checksum for later)
• Go to you my_autobuild.xml file, and look for the kdu key.
• The Windows related part should look like this (change paths where needed):

  <key>windows64</key>
  <map>
  <key>archive</key>
  <map>
      <key>hash</key>
      <string>the MD5 hash you obtained previously</string>
      <key>hash_algorithm</key>
      <string>md5</string>
      <key>url</key>
      <string>file:///C:/path/to/kakadu/kdu-8.4.1-windows-233220159.tar.bz2</string>
  </map>
  <key>name</key>
  <string>windows64</string>
  </map>
  

• Just reconfigure with --kdu and recompile.

Open Source

Firestorm is a third party viewer derived from the official Second Life client. The client codebase has been open source since 2007 and is available under the LGPL license.

Download

Pre-built versions of the viewer releases for Windows, Mac and Linux can be downloaded from the official website.

Build Instructions

Build instructions for each operating system can be found using the links below and in the official wiki.

• Windows
• Mac
• Linux

Note

We do not provide support for compiling the viewer or issues resulting from using a self-compiled viewer. However, there is a self-compilers group within Second Life that can be joined to ask questions related to compiling the viewer: Firestorm Self Compilers

Contribute

Help make Firestorm better! You can get involved with improvements by filing bugs and suggesting enhancements via JIRA or creating pull requests.