I don’t write often these days. A couple of things have inspired me. One is ValKalAstra posting an interesting image. You can see it here on the Second Life Forum or on Flickr. For me this was a ‘how did she do that?’

The Second Life viewers, the Lab’s and third-party viewers, have filters for the Snapshots. Those are easy to use. To change the active render one has to get into tweaking a huge set of settings. Not so easy. And the sort of wireframe look in Val’s image was something I know I could not do in Firestorm or Black Dragon.

For whatever reason I though this was done in the Alchemy Viewer. I didn’t know about Reshade. Reshade is an add-on app for video games. It used to add image filters to a game that does not have them. So, the wireframe looks of the image intrigued me. I though Alchemy had some new twist on wireframe mode. So… I got the viewer.

Alchemy Viewer for Second Life

Alchemy is a third-party viewer. You’ll find it listed in the SL Wiki’s list of Third-Party Viewers. See the Details.

I downloaded and am running Alchemy Beta 7.1.9.2492 (64bit).

Alchemy supports RLVa and uses version RLV v3.4.3 / RLVa v2.5.0.2492.

Also, Alchemy uses OpenJPEG Runtime: 2.4.0. I find this a concern. I remember when the Lab used Kakadu and all other third-party viewers used various JPEG2000 open source libraries for encoding and decoding images. It was a mess. Images often only looked correct from the viewer brand-model that uploaded them. OMG!

Eventually, the Firestorm Team decided to spring for Kakadu. It isn’t free. Then Firestorm and the Lab were using the same high-quality software and things got WAY better. I upload images in either Firestorm or the Lab’s viewer. Since most people use either Firestorm or SL’s viewers, the problem has mostly disappeared. And may be OpenJPEG is better now… But, while I may experiment with Alchemy’s viewer for uploads, I probably will stick with the proven.

The user interface in Alchemy is very much like Firestorm’s. There are differences. I find it annoying at times. But in day to day use the differences are not all that much of a bother.

Like most viewers, Alchemy has SKINS…   which is good. I found the default Alchemy skin difficult to use. Text in various panels was too dim. That is adjustable for chat and IM and for name tags. But I couldn’t find a setting for text in the panels I was having a problem with. So, while there may be a setting, I didn’t find it. I know there is a setting in the XML files. But I am too lazy to look for it. I switched to the ‘Second Life’ skin, which is better but I don’t think it is that much like the SL Viewer.

You do have to click APPLY, OK, and restart/relog when changing skins.

More pages. Buttons below.