To give you some background of me, I'm an ethical copybotter. I purchase what I take out before, don't redistribute, and utilize these tools to further my own creativity and modding options. These are the things I personally promote and aspire other copybotters to do, but I'm not your mom, so here are the ways to steal meshes in 2024:
Firstly, there are two options you can go with. Each will require an installation of both Hydrastorm and Firestorm.
To start:
•Install Firestorm (<Insert whichever Firestorm version we're at here>)
•Install Hydrastorm (
[To see links please register here]
)•Optional (But encouraged) is installing Mesh Helper (
[To see links please register here]
)•Open Firestorm once, then close it. this will initiallize the 'user_settings' in your Firestorm AppData to get to the next steps. This is key, because Hydrastorm borrows from Firestorm in most things, as it's masking itself as that.
Option One (Basic option):
Each time you wish to use Hydrastorm, go into "AppData/roaming/Firestorm_x64/user_settings" and delete 'fsdata.xml' and 'key_bindings.xml'.
Deleting 'key_bindings' removes the overlapping key settings that are not in this old version of Hydrastorm, and deleting 'fsdata' makes it so it doesn't check/authenticate that it's that version, and bypasses the check of what version of Firestorm you are running on their end.
If you get a "Linden Labs is watching you"? They're not. They really do not care. Don't panic. That is a message and scare tactic from Firestorm Devs that they detected someone logging in from the version of Firestorm that Hydrastorm is spoofed as. You bypass that by deleting the 'fsdata' file.
If you see "2024-01-05T21:50:44Z ERROR # newview/llviewerinput.cpp(1206) LLViewerInput::bindMouse : Can't bind key to function script_trigger_lbutton, no function with this name found" then you didn't delete the 'key_bindings' file.
You would have to do this every time you wanted to use Hydrastorm again after using Firestorm without going the route of the more advanced options. You would not need to do anything when going from Hydrastorm to Firestorm, as Firestorm will overwrite any files it considers to be 'older' with it's initial startup.
Option Two (Advanced option):
There are two routes to go with this, and both are generally the same concept. It always starts with installing both clients.
1. Get a laptop or other PC that you will exclusively use Hydrastorm on and never Firestorm. You'll never have to delete the 'fsdata' or the 'key_bindings' folder again (which wipes your settings and your saved passwords each time.
2. Make a different account on your PC and use Hydrastorm on it. Because the AppData files are local to each user, you can get-around the need to delete the two files each time by just only using Hydrastorm on that account on your PC. This is the option I personally use.
Mesh Helper tips:
• Mesh Helper is a tool that can read Hydrastorm exports as XML and convert them into working DAEs with rigging information, if applicable. Make sure you toggle the option to have each face as a different material (especially if retexturing), and you'll have to delete your cache folder for Mesh Helper if you're going to pull the same mesh twice for some reason.
• Your cache folder location is generally "AppData\Local\FirestormOS_x64".
• I have found that Blender 2.79 with Avastar 2.4.0 works the best for these converted DAE files initially.
• Not every rigging skeleton is the same. Especially in some brands as they just rig to one body and manually readjust the weights on that one body to roughly fit another instead of properly re-rigging it to that body.
• If reuploading, look at what the original upload had their lowest LOD set to, cause that will affect ARC and upload costs. Some creators are really vile with this (Legacy for example) and upload at a very low number of tris on their lowest LOD to get past these limitations and fool the viewers to not thinking their meshes are overcomplicated hot garbage.