English | 日本語 | 中文

AYAstorm is a custom Second Life viewer based on Firestorm. It adds rendering enhancements, UI improvements, and first-class Japanese language support.

Open from the AYAstorm menu (between Build and Help) → AYAstorm Controls..., or press Alt+C.

A single floater that surfaces AYAstorm's preset master switches and 11 rendering categories on the left tab strip. Every control has a D button to snap back to the AYAstorm preset default, so you can live A/B-tune without hunting through debug settings.

• General — Master switches for SSAO / Glow & Bloom / Render Attached Particles, plus the Reflection probe quality slider. Use this tab as the top-level on/off panel before diving into per-effect tuning

• Shadows — Shadow Detail level (off / sun only / sun + spot + projector), automatic vs. manual cascade distance, shadow blur size, resolution scale, and shadow far clip. Lets you balance softness against shadow draw distance

• SSAO — SSAO master toggle (mirrors General tab), Blur deferred lights toggle, and AO tuning sliders. Adjust contact shadow strength and falloff

• DoF & Camera — Depth of Field master, High-quality DoF (4× CoF, depth-gated), front-of-focus blur, alpha-blended-surface depth inclusion, plus camera-side AYAstorm preset values (focal length / aperture / etc.) and a DoF-coupled chromatic aberration strength slider

• SSR — Screen Space Reflections master toggle and six quality-tuning sliders (step count, max distance, etc.). Adds wet-floor / glass reflections on top of the deferred opaque buffer

• Motion Blur — Motion Blur master toggle, separate Blur self avatar and Blur other avatars switches, plus an Antialiasing sub-section

• Glow & Volumetric — Glow / Bloom intensity tuning, Volumetric Lighting (AYA godrays) with directional fade (sun-below-horizon), and a separate Godrays (sun-facing beam) pass for the brighter on-axis variant

• Lighting — Enable fullbright textures (global), render in-world point/spot lights, render own attached lights, render others' attached lights — the four switches that decide how much the local-light pipeline contributes to the scene

• Post-process — Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) and Post FX sliders, applied as the final post-process pass over the framebuffer

• Atmosphere & sky — Sky depth & sun glare, distant blue haze, and a morning blue / evening warm tint — AYAstorm View's signature atmosphere shaping on top of EEP

• Skin SSS — Subsurface Scattering for skin translucency: master switch, blur radius / strength / etc. parameters, and a target-mesh-UUID whitelist with Lock editing (prevent accidental changes) and Reset all to defaults

Tip: change the View Mode (Firestorm / AYAstorm View) in Preferences → Graphics. Restart the viewer after switching to apply.

Configurable from Preferences → Graphics → Rendering tab.

• Shadow Softness — New slider to soften shadow edges

• Selectable Tone Mappers — Upstream Firestorm hard-codes Khronos Neutral internally; AYAstorm exposes a UI selector with five options:

  • Khronos Neutral / ACES / Filmic (Uncharted 2) / Uchimura (GT) / Filmic (BD Style)

• Color Grading Controls — Adjustable Saturation, Contrast, Color Temperature, and Brightness sliders (with a Reset Color Grading button) added to the UI

• Color LUT (.cube) Loading — Apply 3D LUT files (.cube) for post-process color grading. Seven presets are bundled (teal_orange, warm, cold_war, sepia, cool, cinematic, film_noir), but the primary goal is to let users load their own .cube files to fully customize the look of the viewer. Pick a LUT via Browse... and adjust LUT Intensity to taste

Configurable from Preferences → Firestorm → Build 2 tab.

• Hide objects outside your parcel — Don't render objects outside the parcel you're currently standing on. Works on any parcel — handy when taking screenshots and you want to clear away neighbouring prims or signs from the background. Avatars / attachments / HUDs / your own objects can be kept visible via Keep avatars visible / Keep my own objects visible

Just write the tag below into the parcel description and any AYAstorm visitor to that parcel will have the hide-outside behaviour forced on. Other viewers (upstream Firestorm, official LL viewer, etc.) ignore the tag entirely, so it functions as a "privacy tag that only affects AYAstorm users". As parcel owner you can set it without any cooperation from visitors.

Tag format:

[parcelhide:{key:value}{key:value}...]

• Can appear anywhere in the description (other text before/after is fine)
• The legacy [AYAstorm:...] form is still accepted (renamed to [parcelhide:...] in r5)

Examples:

Effect comparison:

Without tag (normal rendering)	With tag ([parcelhide:...] in description)

Plays HTTP audio streams (SHOUTcast / Icecast / static MP3 / Vorbis / Opus / FLAC) as 3D-positional audio from prim locations. Unlike SL's standard parcel-level 2D BGM, sound direction and distance update in real time as the listener moves. Use cases: live venue PA / ambient audio / multi-speaker venues / 5.1ch venue deployment. Configure entirely by writing tags into a prim's Description field — no LSL script required.

Minimum example:

[3dstream:{url:http://example.com/stream.mp3}]

The prim with this tag plays the stream as 3D-positional audio.

Stereo / 5.1ch / multi-speaker support:

Assign [3dstream-stereo:{ch:L|R|M|FL|FR|C|LFE|SL|SR}] to prims in a linkset to split L/R across separate prims or deploy a 5.1ch source onto 6 prims. The full reference (all keys, compatibility matrix, broadcaster recipes, troubleshooting) is in the per-language guides below.

Full reference:

• 🇯🇵 3D Stream タグ書式ガイド (日本語)
• 🇬🇧 3D Stream Tag Format Guide (English)
• 🇨🇳 3D Stream 标签格式指南 (简体中文)

Configurable from Preferences → Chat → Chat Windows tab.

• Ported LL-style Chat Window — Upstream Firestorm's Nearby Chat already offers the capable FS V1 (plain text) and FS V7 (modern headers) styles, but seeing who is within chat range requires opening a separate window. AYAstorm adds a new LL style that ports the look of Linden Lab's official viewer's CONVERSATIONS window, letting you see avatars within chat range directly inside the chat window — no extra panel needed

• Profile Icons Next to Speakers (Show mini icons in chat) — Show each speaker's profile icon next to their name on every chat line, so you can intuitively tell who said what instead of squinting at name strings alone

  

• Chat Range Participant Filter — Show only avatars within chat range (20m) in the nearby chat list

• Fixed IME Candidate Window Position on Linux + Mozc + Fcitx5 — Upstream Firestorm has a critical bug on Linux where the conversion candidate window jumps to the bottom-left of the screen, making Mozc + Fcitx5 essentially unusable. AYAstorm fixes this so candidates appear directly under the caret as expected. Especially impactful for Japanese-speaking Linux users

• Four Bundled Japanese Font Families — Japanese text renders correctly out of the box, no extra install required. Switch between them in Preferences:

  • Noto Sans JP — Google Noto's Japanese sans-serif. Neutral and versatile, the default recommendation
  • IBM Plex Sans JP — IBM's open-source corporate font. Slightly geometric, modern feel
  • Alibaba Sans JP — Alibaba's open-sourced sans-serif. Soft and friendly
  • LINE Seed JP — LINE Corp's open-source font. Contemporary with a touch of character

• OTF Font Support Fix — OTF format fonts (Alibaba / IBM Plex / LINE Seed JP above are OTF) now load correctly

• Skin SSS — avatar photography: 🇺🇸 en · 🇯🇵 ja · 🇨🇳 zh
• 3D Stream tag format: 🇺🇸 en · 🇯🇵 ja · 🇨🇳 zh

SL-viewer-wide bugs and AYAstorm's fixes — published as open specs for free adoption by any LL-derived viewer fork. No PR required, pull what you need.

• Rigged Mesh Picker — GPU object-ID buffer: 🇺🇸 en · 🇯🇵 ja · 🇨🇳 zh
• Double Alpha Block — forward alpha BLEND fix (separate disclosure branch): 🇺🇸 en · 🇯🇵 ja · 🇨🇳 zh

Pre-built binaries are available from GitHub Releases.

For older CPUs without AVX2 (Windows only): If you run the AVX2 build above, the installer will show a message before installation begins. Download Phoenix-FirestormOS-AYAstorm-release_LEGACY-*_Setup.exe instead. AVX2 is supported on most Intel / AMD CPUs from 2013 onward, so the AVX2 build works for most users.

Linux install example:

tar xf Phoenix-FirestormOS-AYAstorm-release_LEGACY-*.tar.xz
cd Phoenix-FirestormOS-AYAstorm-release_LEGACY-*/
./install.sh
~/ayastorm/ayastorm

AYAstorm-specific build guide (Linux / Windows):

• AYAstorm Build Guide

Upstream Firestorm build guides (refer to these for Mac):

• Windows
• Mac
• Linux

mayatonton Creator / Maintainer

t-noami Co-Maintainer

Want to help build AYAstorm? Bug reports, PRs, and translations are all welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

AYAstorm is a fork of Phoenix Firestorm, which is itself an open-source viewer derived from the official Second Life client, licensed under LGPL.

Huge thanks to the Firestorm team and all upstream contributors whose work AYAstorm builds upon: