Tag: Alchemy

On Wednesday August 27th, the Alchemy team released further beta version of their v3-style viewer, which they refer to as a celebratory release, marking their inclusion in the Lab’s Third Party Viewer Directory.

As a beta, version 3.7.14.33534, the release obviously isn’t a full feature release; as Cinder notes in the blog post, it is still a work-in-progress, and the Alchemy team are still working on things. As such, this article is a rapid-fire overview of points-of-note, rather than an in-depth article.

The new release is available for Windows (32-bit and 64-bit) and Mac (64-bit), with Linux referred to as “coming soon”. I installed the Windows 64-bit version, which not only suited my system, it allowed me to run the new beta alongside the 32-bit version of the previous beta release, which I looked at back in April. Installation was smooth and direct, with the viewer firing-up automatically once installation had finished. No anti-virus flags triggered, just my usual firewall warning about the SLplugin for voice,

Starting the viewer revealed the most notable change to it – the UI font presentation. To quote Cinder’s blog post:

We’ve decided that Adobe® Source Sans Pro is a little nicer on the eyes, and Sovereign went to great lengths to push around the pixels and make everything fit just right.

The viewer certainly reflects this effort; font presentation is crisp and sharp (doubly so, perhaps on my new shiny monitor! 🙂 ), and everything fits the floaters, button, icons, toasts, etc., perfectly when using a default UI size, and it scales nicely with the UI size slider. Alongside of this, the UI itself has been generally refreshed, although some of the updates may not appear obvious to the eye.

Preferences

Preferences get the same UI refresh as the rest of the viewer, and a couple of changes in the Move & View tab, which see the addition of two camera constraints check boxes (Disable Minimum Zoom and Disable Object Push), and a check box for Realistic Mouselook (which comes to Alchemy via NiranV Dean).

Toolbar Buttons

Alchemy 3.7.14 sees changes to the toolbar buttons available to users.

Of particular note with this release is the addition of the buttons for sharing to Twitter and Flickr, the Region Tracker and Quick Settings buttons (both of which are examined later in this article), and the removal of the Windlight button.

Legacy Profiles

Legacy profiles come to Alchemy with a completely fresh implementation of the profile floater, which has been neatly integrated into the People floater. Accessing your own profile can be done from the Me menu or the Profile button, as per usual, while accessing other people’s profiles can be done through the right-click avatar context menu, also as per usual.

All of these options open the new profile panel within the People floater, and the arrow at the top left of the floater will switch you back to the People panel display itself, allowing you to page back and forth between, say, Nearby People and individual profiles quickly and easily, and without opening additional floaters. Note that in this regard, your own avatar is listed in Nearby People, allowing you a further means of accessing your own profile information.

This entire approach is smooth and sweet, and followed through with all other means of accessing a profile (e.g. through the mini-map, and so on). Nor does it end there. The updated Profile display neatly organises the various tabs – Second Life, Groups, Interests, etc, vertically, with what might be the mostly common-used option buttons (Chat, Add Friend, Block) ranged at the bottom of the display, with a gear icon providing access to additional options – share, offer teleport, request teleport, Pay, etc.

Snapshot Floater Update

As I’ve recently reported, the official viewer is gaining a more unified snapshot floater (at the time of writing, available via the Snowstorm RC viewer version 3.7.15.293295). Given that this beta release of Alchemy is based on the Lab’s 3.7.14 release code, it doesn’t include the newer snapshot floater; instead it provides its own means switching to the Facebook, Flickr and Twitter floaters.

This has been achieved via the addition of three links (rather than buttons) at the foot of the snapshot floater itself. Clicking on any one of these will close the snapshot floater and open the required upload floater.

Continue reading “Alchemy brews a new beta” →

Sovereign Engineer poked me about the beta release of a v3- based third-party viewer going by the name of Alchemy, which was announced to the world on Saturday April 26th, 2014.

Now the name might be familiar to some, give that the pot has been simmering away on this one since around the middle of 2013, and there have been a number of blog posts on the associated website and some discussion over at SL Universe. However, it can take time to pull a viewer together – not to mention maintain it – so much so that Shakespeare himself couldn’t have put it better when he wrote Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble, even if the meaning is a little reversed in this case, and the doubling of toil falls onto the alchemists who are bringing this latest TPV to life.

Nevertheless, the beta release – version  14.4.26.30997 – is now out for Windows, Mac and Linux (all, I believe, 32-bit). I’m not entirely sure which LL code base the viewer is built upon as there is no indication in either the About floater or on the website, but I’m guessing it’s probably the 3.7.4 or 3.7.6 code base, given the presence of things like the recent HTTP updates.

The overall aim of the viewer, according to the website, is to provide: “A Second Life Protocol compatible viewer targeted at stability, performance, and having a well thought out skin and feature set”.

Currently, three active members of the team are listed on the website: Sovereign Engineer (aka Drake, the project lead), Luminous Luminos (aka Cryo) and Inusaito Kanya (aka Lirusaito), all of whom have worked on / contributed to other TPV projects. The viewer also lists Miguael Liamano (aka Tarnix) and Captains Ghost, both of whom (or one or the other) appear to be taking care of the website.

So, what of the viewer itself?

Well, first off, this is a beta release, so don’t expect it to be all bells and whistles and how-do-you-dos. In terms of menus and Preferences, it has everything you’d expect of a v3-based TPV aimed at Second Life, including Havok sub-licensing support (which means this isn’t a viewer aim towards OpenSim as well).

The UI is a clean slate grey colour, slightly darker than the LL viewer, but with opacity set to 0.95 by default for the active floater, and inactive floaters at 0.55. In terms of size and general presentation, many of the floater panels appear more-or-less as they are rendered within the official viewer, although there are some shaper colour contrasts apparent, which can deceive the eye and brain into thinking some of the panels are more cluttered in Alchemy than is actually the case.

An example of this is World Map. There are no significant differences between it and the LL World Map. However, the flatter colours in the Alchemy world map, perhaps aided by the black / dark background to input and check boxes, tricks the eye into seeing the map as being somewhat more crowded than is actually the case when first opened.

Which is not to say all of the floaters are untouched. The build floater, for example, has been reworked to include popular open-source additions – notably Qarl Fizz’s prim alignment tool – and has been reorganised somewhat. The result, assisted by the subtle use of shading, is a more regimented feel to the floater which naturally helps the eye in locating options and option groups.

When it comes to Preferences, Alchemy again doesn’t stray too far from the LL “norm”, although there are a number of TPV-specific additions, and there are hints of the Things to Come. The latter takes the form of an additional Preferences tab called Interface, which currently comprises three sub-tabs: General, Inventory and Status Bar, all of which have but one or two options for the time being, although more will doubtless follow as the viewer progresses.

Some of the tabs have been re-worked from the LL original; a good example of this is the Chat tab, which both splits-off the notification options into a sub-tab while adding a number of additional check-box options (turning off the typing animation, etc), which are again popular in TPVs. Chat also includes sub-tab for popular chat shortcut commands which Firestorm (and before it, Phoenix) made popular.

Performance-wise, the view is slick and fast, easily on a par with all current v3-based viewers in terms of fps when running on my primary machine; I was getting 70+ fps at ground level in a region with five other avatars and a lot going on, which was more than adequate for my needs, and even when visiting The Golden Age of Russian Avant-Garde, I found my fps up in the 50s, which kept me perfectly happy during my explorations there.

In support of the viewer, the team have started on a wiki – although this still in the very early stages of development; there is also a JIRA, and the source is available through BitBucket – all of which can be accessed via the Alchemy website, or through links in the Help menu of the viewer itself.

As a beta version of an emerging viewer, anyone trying it out shouldn’t expect it to be packed to the gills with the more common-or-garden open-source / TPV additions (there’s not RLV / RLVa, and no media filter, for example), but as noted above, capabilities will doubtless be added over time as the dev team further refine the direction in which they want to take the viewer. In the meantime, this is a good start, and it’ll be interesting to see how Alchemy develops – and both the pace at which it develops and the direction it takes in terms of its own feature set.

Related Links

• Alchemy website
• Alchemy download page