Watch Black Dragon In Action: 3rd Party SL Viewer With Great Graphics Effects

Watch YouTuber Tyus Haze give a quick test drive of the Black Dragon viewer, a third party viewer I've admired for quite some time. Watch Tyus' video and you'll be able to tell why. "I'm just so amazed at how a viewer in SL can look this good and not do any damage to my computer, and I'm not lagging a bit," he says at one point. "Now if I was trying this on Firestorm, I'd be in all kinds of mess." He promises an in-depth tutorial for installing and configuring BD, so you may want to give him a Subscribe. More NWN coverage of Black Dragon below, including commentary from its creator, NiranV Dean:

• Second Life As Seen Through The Black Dragon Viewer
• The Graphics Features That Make SL's Black Dragon Special
• Make Avatars Around You Dance On Command With New Black Dragon SL

Comments

[YsabelleStewart]

I've used this viewer - it's good for photography. I seem to recall that it was less laggy at one point, but I haven't used it for a while and couldn't comment on it now. This video is making me think I need to give it another go.

[amandamagick]

hopefully some day it will be available for Mac users.

[Kashner Abrahams]

I have it but still have no idea what my settings should be in preferences. I have lines coming out if my body. I can't uninstall and reinstall either for some reason. It sucks because I love al but never get on anymore due to lag and crashing

[Philida]

Please keep posting info. This might be the viewer we need next if crashing and lag stays this way with FS

[Zoey neville]

I haven't been crashing and lagging on firestorm at all. Black dragon is a photographer viewer that's it , it's not user friendly and has been out for 2 to 3 years developed by the team that did the other photo viewer niran. I do not recommend this for anyone other than photographers , the controls are bleh at best.

[Yolanda Squatpump]

This viewer is ok if you can trust a control freak nutjob furry weirdo who makes it. I don't.

[Wagner J Au]

Thank you for that helpful and civil comment, Ms. Squatpump, thank you.

[NiranV Dean]

@amanda
I don't want to crush your hopes but I won't make a mac version, the only way a mac version would ever become reality is someone else doing it.

@Kashner
You would do me a great favor if you used the very conveniently placed friendlist entry of myself (or the search if you're not using my Viewer) to contact me inworld and give me your hardware details (from Help menu) and not less important a screenshot of your problem so i can have a look at it and possibly get it fixed with you.

@Zoey
It's a Viewer like any other, it just so happens that it's primary focus is delivering better graphics overall, faster and easier. The Viewer is developed by no Team, it's being developed solely by me and has been for over 5 years now. I highly disagree that it's not user friendly, i have done much more than you think to make everything as streamlined and easy as possible given the limitations within the UI, user friendliness is highly subject to each individual and you might find it not user friendly because you are used to a different UI, don't blame your lack of interest to get along with a different UI on the user friendliness of the Viewer. The controls on the other hand are almost exactly the same as the LL Viewer and thus every other Viewer, the only difference is strafing left and right are by default bound to where usually rotating left and right would be, you can change these controls back and on top of that you can change them completely or add even more bindings. If you didn't find said feature to rebind keys even with its obvious label (Keybinding) that's again your personal problem, don't blame it on the Viewer. Thanks.

@Yolanda
Says can't trust an open asshole but probably used/uses Emerald/Phoenix/Firestorm or Alchemy. Double Standards much?

To the article itself:
Can't wait to see him doing an "in-depth" tutorial, i always love watching people taking the first steps into a new experience.

[Patchouli Woollahra]

@yolanda:

The line between genius and insanity is oft blurred. Niran may be a bit of a "control freak nutjob furry weirdo", but he's also a genius who managed to put nitro into a viewer not known for framerates in excess of 20fps for the most part. What have YOU done lately?

@phillda:

I'm sure the current issues with Firestorm atm are fixable, but I'm okay with using multiple viewers since no one viewer is optimised for every aspect of SL. That's the beauty of the TPV policy LL pursues - if you don't like how their code works, feel free to fork it (so long as you remain TOS-compliant - not that that's stopped some folks!)

The only issue I can think of is that the AD keys are remapped to behave like first-person shooter movement keys instead of the turning keys that most SL viewers implement. depending on what items you're wearing this may break your ability to control your avatar into turns especially if they contain touch functions and constitute a large part or all of your avatar's back. Otherwise, this is a very good viewer in its context: great graphics, more advanced animation handling but usability is paid barely just enough attention that SL photogs can put up with its idiosyncracies.

[NiranV Dean]

@Patchouli
The cases in which the A/D remap caused problems in scripted objects have so far not exceeded 0. Which is to be expected due to the way vehicles for example work.

To understand this: Your controls are separated into several modes, third person, first person, sitting, appearance and editing. Black Dragon allows remapping them all just like you could with editing the XML file, although through the UI here. vehicles, because you sit on them, use the sitting controls, thus the changed action on A and D in third person has no effect on vehicles. Also scripts can differentiate between actually walking left/right (strafing) or turning around thus the different actions on both of these keys should again not interfere with scripted objects. The only issue that surfaced so far is vehicle left/right were inverted. That's because i inverted them at some point because i wanted the sitting camera to behave more natural. The problem was that pressing left turned the camera right, which i found possibly very confusing to the user because the user expects the camera to look right when pressing right, not when pressing left, but pressing right and making the camera look left is correct since the camera rotates right around the center point. Inverting this made the camera look to the right when pressing right, a much better feel but had the downside of inverting all vehicle controls.

This is fixed in the latest release.

into a viewer not known for framerates in excess of 20fps for the most part

Sadly. This is widely spread false information, people hear the Viewer is focused on graphics and adds more fancy stuff which automatically prompts the thought that this must cost a tremendous amount of extra resources which isn't the case at all. Infact, any computer that can run any other Viewer with Deferred Rendering (Advanced Lighting Model) activated can run this Viewer in its most basic form recommended too. Enabling all the fancy stuff like shadows, ssao, dof and so on have the same impact if not less (in case of shadows) than the official Viewer or others while looking equally good or even better (the comparison to the official Viewer is almost unfair but at the same time the best comparison since the Viewer is originally based on it and the official is the closest to Black Dragon). Better graphics don't always mean you need a monstrous high end PC, i have no high end PC either, my hardware is over 5 years old now.
GTX 670,
AMD FX 6200 (3,8ghz) Six Core,
and 16GB super slow DDR3 (1033mhz) RAM.

Anyone who goes out and buys anything of 100-200$ value today will get better hardware than i got. You can get a GTX 1060 for 250-300$, the same or a better CPU for 100$ and MUCH MUCH faster RAM with another 100$, nothing compared to what i paid for my stuff back then and quite a lot faster than anything i could ever do with my hardware. It's quite shocking how easy it is to run the Viewer with most settings on like i do.