Second Life

Things about SL

SL22B Exploring

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Still undecided on what to do with this blog. I use it for historical reference. Stuff like when the Lab introduced mesh and other historical references. I play more in Second Life now. I put more photos into the Second Life(TM) Forum. I only pay a ‘little’ attention to what is happen technically in SL. … Read more

Problems…

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2/4/2025 – Update. I finally took time to make a quick patch. There is more left to do. Basically PHP and Python updates make my thyme obsolete. I’ll have to decide if I keep the blog and update the thyme or move on. Decisions, decisions… I don’t blog as much as I used to. So, … Read more

Optimizing Second Life Snapshots: Alchemy Viewer & Reshade Guide

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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.

ReShade Image from Alchemy
Playing with ReShade in Alchemy 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.

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Firestorm Viewer 7.1.9 Problems

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The latest release is causing many people lots of problems. For others no problems. I find this version of Firestorm Viewer to be the most problematic viewer from Firestorm that I’ve used in a long time. But I remember the OLD DAYS when viewers were seriously buggy.

So, what problems are people seeing with the Firestorm Viewer?

Slow render/rez – I see a bit of that. While I think Firestorm is generally faster at rezzing scenes often something just doesn’t rez. And it never rezzes or I don’t have enough patience, which sucks. But there are two quick fixes… or may be that is two steps to a fix… Press Ctrl-Shift-R twice to pop in and out of Wire Frame mode. This will usually cause everything to render correctly, scene and avatar.

Once in a while changing to Wire Frame won’t cause the avatar to render fully. Some times everything but the avatar rezzed fully. In these cases or just to restore the avatar Rebake the Avatar: top menu Avatar->Avatar Health->Force Appearance Update (Rebake) or Ctrl-Alt-R.

One or both of these steps should get you easily rendered and avoid restarting the viewer.

Viewer Crashes/Freezes – These are difficult to pin down. Before you start trying to troubleshoot the problem make sure your computer is in good shape and working well.

First, run the System File Checker built into Windows, 10 and 11. Do that by opening a command window and running the SFC command as an administrator. See the images on this page. Also, you can search for Windows 10 System File Checker for more detailed information and step by steps.

Open Command Window

Enter the command: SFC /SCANNOW. This will take 5 or 10 minutes to run. It will find any problems with the Windows System Files that may be causing problems. It will end and tell you; all was OK, it fixed things, or is could not fix the problems. If the problems are such it cannot fix them, then you need to search for: fixing Windows [10/11] DISM. This is a bit more complicated but it is still only a couple of commands and Windows does the work. The result is almost as good as a reinstall of Windows without the annoying need to reinstall apps.

Make sure your Windows install has all the updates installed. Type: Windows Update.

Make sure your graphics drivers are up to date. You can search for: how to update Win[10/11] graphics driver [your card’s brand name].

Click below for more…

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Firestorm Viewer 7.1.9.74745 PBR

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Released on June 20, 2024 – Thursday. We now have a new major update to the viewer. The Firestorm Viewer’s Project website has a long article on the viewer. Inara’s blog has more ‘explanatory’ article here. Between the two you should get all the tech info you could want. So… I’m not going to repeat it.

My take after a couple days…

Performance

The SL forum is popping with love and hate… The Luddites that long ago lost touch with reality and sing their perpetual poor me songs with choruses about how bad, stupid, and tyrannical the Lab is and how awful it is they are being forced to update their computer. And there are, as usual, a number of people rolling their eyes.

I like to check performance. I do care about appearance. But performance often decides how much appearance I’ll give up or upgrade. I want to be able to fly and sail. I’m not much of a driver. I run off the road… a lot.

So… the previous version 6.6.17 was what I ran until Friday. You can see the stats from my practical but technically lame testing here (12/19/2023).

This year I live in SL in the same place. Also, I have not tweaked the viewers setting after installing 7.1.9. Except for Draw Distance.

My new measurements are:

LocationFPS v7 DeskFPS v7 LapFPS v6
Porch 512m5118.6
Porch 128m4610.340.5
Porch 128m w/snowSnow Melted37-48
Green Room @ 2200m DD=128m11923.4150
Nelsonia 14peps @ DD= 128m5370-74
Arapaima 20peps @ 128m 63*50-55
Exhale Club 57peps @ 128m4148-52
Performance Numbers

Performance is mixed. Some areas seems better and some worse, as in slower. The oddity in in Arapaima’s Safe Hub is from the avatars being spread out all over the place. In Nelsonia the avatars were clumped together on the landing point. So the number within the field of view probably accounts for the difference.

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Firestorm Viewer 6.6.17.70368

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It has been some time since I checked the performance of my Firestorm Viewer. The last check was 9/2022. So, over a year.

This year I had some trouble running the tests. My house in Bellisseria was not rezzing. I mean floors and walls were missing. After a couple of three logins, I got the floors and walls but had to wait for the textures to fully render.

My House 2023 – Render Fail

I checked and found Windows again used 100% of my hard drive’s capacity when a region was being difficult. The viewer used little CPU, GPU, and network resources while it waited on the hard drive.

Ever since the release of Windows 11, my Win-10 has been having this problem of 100% disk use for 5 to 15 minutes. Occassionally more. Very annoying.

Firestorm Hot Fix v6.6.17

Porch 512m18.6 fps
Porch 128m40.5
Porch 128m w/snow37-48
Green Room @ 2200m DD=128m150
Nelsonia 17peps @ DD= 128m70-74
Arapaima 37peps @ 128m 50-55
Exhale Club 28peps @ 128m48-52
Performance Tests

With this version, I am getting almost the same numbers as in 2022 with v6.6.4. You can use the link above if you want to compare.

Second Life Viewer

Porch 512m18.6 fps
Porch 128m40
Porch 128m w/snow52
Green Room @ 2200m DD=128m60
Nelsonia 16peps @ DD= 128m58
Arapaima 34peps @ 128m 60
Exhale Club 48peps @ 128m37
Performance Tests

The FS and SL viewers are similar. Except for my Green Room. This is the recent PBR-enabled SL viewer.

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