New TPV on Linden List

I see that Oz Linden added the Alchemy Viewer to the Third Party Viewer list. They describe it as: An experimental Second Life™ viewer striving to be at the forefront of stability, performance, and technological advancement in the open-source metaverse viewer field.

Derivative of Henry Jose's image - Flickr

Derivative of Henry Jose’s image – Flickr

Sovereign Engineer is the lead in this viewer’s development. The blog is here. The downloads are here. The blog still lists the viewer as a beta version. There are only 32-bit versions, AFAIK.

The list of people working on the viewer is shown as:

Drake Arconis (sovereign.engineer) | Project Manager | Lead Developer
Cryo (luminous.luminos) | Linux Developer
Cinder (cinder.roxley) | Mac Developer
Lirusaito (inusaito.kanya) | Feature Fox

The blog appears to have started in June 2013. Inara did a review of the viewer in April 2014: Alchemy: cooking up a TPV

Download

The file size is about 29mb. The download is form Bitbucket, so it downloads pretty fast.

Install

The viewer installs in: C:\Program Files (x86)\AlchemyBeta.

The install is simple as are most viewer installs.

The first thing I notice is the user interface uses the newer Windows 8 style flat icons. It gives the impression of a less busy interface.

Menus are very similar to the SL Viewer. But, there are differences. Generally I could find everything I looked for. Plus there are several additional features you find in third party viewers. It lacks Firestorm’s Photo Tools, AFAIK.

The viewer uses its own cache. The default size is 1024mb. It has its own folders for settings and chat logs. It should not conflict with other viewers.

My frame rates were around 15 to 30. Scene render was quick and I didn’t notice any texture thrashing, full render, blurry, re-render, etc.

I found it a nice viewer to use. While the menu are very similar, they do seem better organized. They add tabs where more room is needed and additional features are in logical places, at least for how my mind works.

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