Posted in Developer Zone, Phoenix / Firestorm, Programming, Second Life, Viewers

Compiling the Firestorm Viewer

Last updated 16-Dec-2023


Extended instructions, tips, and ‘gotchas’ on how to compile and build Firestorm, a third-party Open Source viewer for use with Second Life by Linden Lab.

Includes both Firestorm for Windows and also Firestorm for Ubuntu Linux.

First published in February 2014, and regularly updated ever since.

NOTE: This article assumes that you are a competent software developer who is comfortable with C++ build environments and command consoles. Most people will have no need to build their own version of Firestorm from the source code.


Continue reading “Compiling the Firestorm Viewer”

Posted in Developer Zone, Programming, Second Life, Viewers

Adding new libraries to a custom Viewer

As part of my private build of Firestorm, the Open Source third-party viewer for Second Life from Linden Lab, I have added new library dependencies for something I am working on (adding metadata to snapshots).

This blog post details how I added them, making use of CMake and modifying various files.

I present it in the hope that it may prove useful to others.

Continue reading “Adding new libraries to a custom Viewer”

Posted in Phoenix / Firestorm, Programming, Second Life, Viewers

The pain of compiling your own Viewer

This post has been superseded. Click here for the updated post. 

I’m sadly well aware that very few people read my blog and that even fewer have the technical ability or desire to build their own Viewer from the source code, but I know there are a handful and this is for them.

Firstly there is a LOT of pain. Lots of getting all the right libraries, support tools, resources and the like before you even begin to struggle with compilation errors.

Mariana Latynina is blogging about compiling under Linux64, and has tried several code bases including Phoenix
See http://marianalatynina.blogspot.com

And Forestaurora is blogging about Phoenix under Windows
See http://forestaurora.wordpress.com

You can see from there quite how much work is involved in getting a compile done. Surely it has to be easier than that?

(Oh, and a ‘hi’ to Tonya as she’s probably the only person who will read this post and even then only because I’ll point her at it. LOL)

Update: The guys at Radegast have the right idea. Ok, it’s not a full Viewer, but even so it’s the kind of thing we’d like to see:
http://radegastclient.org/wiki/Building_From_Source