Second Life and Virtual Worlds
If you have been wondering where the next release of the Alchemy Viewer is, we now know: Fallon, Nevada. The intrigue is dark and the team could use your help…
See Cinder Roxley’s plea for help: We’re Not Dead
OK… it isn’t all that dark or desperate nor was the NSA involved, but it is a bit of fun writing on Cinder’s part.
If you use a translator in Second Life, you know recent changes at Google have caused several models of translators to fail. You also know that since 2012 the viewer’s built-in translator cannot be connected to the Bing or Google translation services as originally planned by the Lab. Viewer translation is essentially broken. We have to use an add-on.
Following this blog you’ve seen the recent previous articles. (See: Second Life: Metanomics Translator Failing.)
CmdrCupcake says with the Alchemy Viewer they plan on a 2 month release cycle. So, that would be a new version every other month.
The Alchemy Viewer developers are considering moving to Linden style viewer update, which would make the Lindens happy. They would like to see all viewers using the automatic update. It has been working for me with the SL Viewer, so this is probably a good thing.
Simon Linden Tells us:
Yes some of the chat servers have been having troubles in the last few days. I’ve been looking into that … the code running there isn’t super new, and the outages might be timed with some of those [hardware update] restarts.
In any case, there is an update soon for the chat servers, and already another in the pipeline.
This week there are no rolls for either the main channel or RC channels. Next week is a no change week. So, I expect no roll outs that week either.
We can expect tweaking to the CDN system. This week whatever they are doing that requires multiple restarts is ongoing.
The main reason for no updates is the hardware updating requiring the restarts scheduled for this week. Estimating time for any individual update or the group is difficult as Simon says, “We also have to actually open up the server box and look inside to see if it needs an update, so it’s random how long each one takes.
This shouldn’t do anything grid-wide, aside from extra region restarts.”
Yesterday about lunch time the Lindens posted a blog article titled Performance, Performance, Performance. The surprising part, at least to me, is the performance improvements made to the Market Place. I’ve been covering the coming change to Viewer Managed Market Place. But, I don’t recall hearing about Market Place (MP) performance improvements.
Whatever, the Lindens say they are seeing a 70% faster response time and pages load 30% faster.
I’ve been sort of covering the improvements to group chat. News in this area is almost always after the fact. The Lindens have realized that whenever they say anything about changing something they get complaints about how the change is the cause of whatever problem users are having. So, they think they get better feedback on some things if they change and listen before saying anything.
This last week we have been running on new code in the chat servers. The metrics say things are MUCH better. I know I haven’t got a ‘cannot connect’ error when trying to comment in group chat this past week. But, I have also been busy and not in world much either.
Download size is 42mb that uses 159mb of disk when installed. The install was error free. Recently I get errors with the Linden installs. Some times a retry fixes it. Others times I have to ignore to continue. The Crash Logger seems to be the problem with the install. I am almost always installing just after running the viewer. The Linden Viewers still seem to work OK in spite of the errors. But, it is reassuring to not have errors.
The install places the viewer in C:\Program Files\AlchemyBeta.
The cache installs in C:\Users\[Win_login_ID]\AppData\Local\Alchemy64. You can set that to be any location you want. I usually move it off my C drive for better performance. Windows uses my C drive for its swapping and temp files. Moving it saves the viewer having to compete for hard drive bandwidth.
It seems the cache for the 32 and 64 bit version are different. I’m not sure why they would do that.
The logs are installed in C:\Users\[Win_login_ID]\AppData\Roaming\Alchemy. So, it seems the 32 bit and 64 bit version use the same logs and chat files. There is a setting that will allow you to place the chat logs wherever you want.