Alchemy Viewer Beta 3.7.19 – Second Life

Alchemy Viewer Logo
Alchemy Viewer Logo

The Alchemy Viewer team has released a new beta version of their viewer. I have yet to try it. But Inara has written up a good review. See: Alchemy 3.7.19: mainlining HTTP and enhancing legacy search.

The viewer’s page announcing the release is here: Alchemy Beta 3.7.19.

It appears we get a search feature in this version that has a new User Interface (UI). The change will change how you use search. It sounds much more efficient. Still, it depends on the SL Search Engine, so I doubt the hit accuracy has improved. That will take some work on the Linden server side to improve. But, this new UI should be nice to use.

The Camera Control gets compressed. But, this is just the standard camera control, not photo tools, which is why I often use Firestorm.

The World Map gets a revamp. They make more efficient use of screen space, or read as removing white-space from the controls. The panel looks busier now. I’ll have to try it before I can decide if it is better or just different.

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Second Life News & Bits 2014-44

Viewer

According to Oz Linden we will see the Benchmark Viewer get promoted to the main default version this week, may be tomorrow, Wednesday. This is the viewer that does away with the GPU Table.

Server Scripting UG 2014-44
Server Scripting UG 2014-44

This viewer is still being tuned to give reliable graphics settings. The one currently in the Alternate viewer page just got some updates. I’m not sure when the ‘just’ is. I suspect last Friday.

On another note about viewers… the Max Bandwidth setting is becoming less important as more of the Second Life™ data moves via pipeline in HTTP. The Max Bandwidth is a setting that controls UDP protocol traffic ONLY. With more and more traffic moving to HTTP the UDP congestion is less and less. See JIRA VWR-29029 for the old problem of setting Max Bandwidth too high. 

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Second Life News 2014-44

Servers

The Deploys of Week post is up. The big news is CDN.

Oops! Don't Panic 2014
Oops! Don’t Panic 2014

CDN

The Content Delivery Network upgrade will roll to the main channel, the entire grid, this week. That will be happening Tuesday morning.

RC Channels

All three RC channels will get the same maintenance package. The detailed release notes are not out yet. All the Deploys post says is there are ‘some improvements’. We’ll probably see more information coming out tomorrow (Tuesday).

Snack Channel

The Snack channel is a small pre-test RC channel. It is used when the Lindens want to start out with a very small sample for testing. It was used for the initial testing of CDN. It is no longer needed and the regions in the Snack channel will be rolled back into the channels they were previously in and the Snack channel will disappear until it is next needed.

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Second Life News 2014-43 #2

This Friday was the Third Party Developer’s Meeting. Oz Linden and other Lindens spoke for about 26 minutes telling us what was coming and where things are in the release pipeline.

Don't Panic 2014
Don’t Panic 2014

Viewer

Today the main viewer remains 3.7.18-295539.

RC Viewers

Friday saw the Lindens putting out a new Benchmark and HTTP RC Viewers.

Benchmark Viewer version 3.7.19.295759 – This is the viewer that does away with the GPU Table. Note, Today (10/25) the Alternate Viewers page is showing this as a new RC and an older version as a Project Viewer. Get the newer one. It has all the updates from the default viewer.

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Second Life News Bits 2014-43

This past weekend was a party weekend for me. I’m still moving a bit slow today.

Viewer

Oz Linden says that when the Benchmark RC Viewer, the one that stops using a GPU Table to select viewer settings, everyone will get a viewer-settings reset to what the viewer now thinks your default settings should be.

Open Source 2014-43
Open Source 2014-43

I don’t know if that means ALL settings or just graphics settings. I suggest you backup your settings now.

The HTTP RC Viewer when used in Blue Steel regions is simply awesome. Download: HTTP Viewer version 3.7.18.295372. A list of Blue Steels regions is here: List of Blue Steel regions in Second Life.

I’ve gotten to use the HTTP RC Viewer for a couple of hours exploring Blue Steel regions. It is a nice change. I quickly got used to the fast render. When I left the Blue Steel regions it was like going from walking downhill to trying to walk in a swimming pool. Ooouf!

See Bittersweet Frostbite’s post about the performance: New Second Life “Berlin” HTTP Viewer: Fast, faster, much faster

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Second Life News 2014-42 #2

Not much new from the Lindens today.

Servers

As planned the main channel did not get a roll out. There were no packages on the RC channels, so there was nothing to roll out.

Bathory

RC Channels

This Wednesday the RC channels a got a new package.

Blue Steel and Snack are now both running the CDN (Content Delivery Network) change. This adds a good number of regions to the test group. I have a Blue Steel region list at the end of the article.

Le Tigre and Magnum got a package with crash fix and a back end improvement in the Abuse Reporting pipeline. 

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