Black Dragon: How to Use the SL Viewer With Great Graphics, Performance

Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer with a cult following among hardcore graphics fans, continues to impress. Watching this usage tutorial by Tyus Deonn, I had to check several times that I was actually looking at Second Life at all, because the graphics are near console quality. Tyus shows viewers how to adjust graphics, avatar movement, and so on -- all very necessary, because many users have complained that the UI is pretty complex. This came up when I last blogged about Black Dragon, prompting creator NiranV Dean to post this explanation:

It's a Viewer like any other, it just so happens that its 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.

... Can't wait to see Tyus doing an "in-depth" tutorial, I always love watching people taking the first steps into a new experience.

And now here it is!

Comments

[D'eandra Simmons]

All that can be done in the regular viewer and Firestorm and they run better to boot. What's the big deal?

[NiranV Dean]

A couple of notes about the video:

- He says "fix" the Viewer, making it sound like the controls are broken, they are not. Moving left/right rather than turning is on purpose. He wasn't using the latest version, i could tell. The latest version includes a button to change keybinds directly which you can also do by simply double clicking an entry. The button to change them simply fills the role as teaching material as it has a tooltip telling you you can do the same by double clicking. You can also select multiple and remove them rather than deleting them one by one as he did in the video.

- He showed his toolbars and how to customize them, he could have shown the default layout and probably made a note that you can put toolbar buttons at the top. Toolbars are a default Viewer feature, i'm quite surprised people actually ask about this specifically in Black Dragon, since it is a feature that can be found in any Viewer 3+. Toolbars is also the actual name of this feature as it is in the Official Viewer. The toolbar editing window can be opened faster and easier by right clicking a toolbar button and selecting "Toolbar buttons..." or by simply hitting Ctrl + Alt + B.

- He is the only one who noted that having the L$ in your inventory is like "putting your money into your wallet" or making it a part of your actual belongings.

- The machinima sidebar is called Machinima Sidebar because it is a sidebar and it's primary purpose is aiding in machinima/photography. A quicker way of opening is pressing F1. The sole purpose of the machinima toolbar button is to show the user that this sidebar exists.

- I find it a bit weird that so many people seem to be bugging him on how to change certain things whereas they all have the ability to ask me via the friendlist as i'm included there.

----

@D'aeandra Simmons

I'm sorry but that is the opposite of the truth. Black Dragon runs equally fast if not faster than the Official Viewer, which is faster than most other Viewers, which are faster than Firestorm. Firestorm has been proven to be the slowest Viewer of them all over and over again. Right now according to all reports i've gotten so far, except that of Nalates on her blog, Black Dragon is by a good chunk the fastest and at the same time best looking Viewer unless you overdo your settings at which any Viewer breaks down.

The "Deal" with Black Dragon is, as clearly not being obvious enough from my quote as well as lipacsun's introduction, the improved, finetuned and additional graphics as well as all its unique features which lipacsun didn't show as it was just a "quick-tutorial" for the most asked questions. But to give you a quick rundown of the Viewer:

Graphics:

Faster and more detailed shadows.
Faster and better screen space ambient occlusion.
Softer, bigger and warmer glow + ambient sun glow.
Better depth of field + optional faster depth of field.
Motion blur.
Screen Space Reflections.
Volumetric Lighting.
Exodus's Post Processing Stack (Tone Mapping, Color Correction and Vignette)

Controls:

Fully rebindable controls for both keyboard and controller movement.

Interface:

Unique user interface with a unique handmade skin.
Every relevant option surfaced into the interface and easily changeable.

Misc:

No rendering of invisible glowing items.
No rendering of invisible items.
Ability to change resolution of shadows for every shadow map + both projectors separately.
Separately toggable world, own attached and other attached lights.
Inworld poser allowing you to fully pose all 133 bones of your avatar.
Ability to hide/unhide and de-fullbright items, faces and single prims in addition to derender.
Fixed controller controls.
Fixed mouselook head position and movement.
Ability to easily change all camera presets in the UI.
Faster updates than Firestorm.
Uhm. Me? You got me as live support (if i'm online, otherwise i'll answer as soon as i see the mail).

Posing Example

Posing Example 2

Straight Rendering Example

And if those aren't enough:
https://youtu.be/53euICErnVg
The login screen video gives you another example and my channel has more of these.

[Connie Arida]

Now if only creators knew how to use projected lighting with nuance and materials, while creators of sims knew how to put it all together. Maybe 1% do.

[NiranV Dean]

@Connie

This is partly Linden Labs fault due to lacking guidelines on how to create good content. All Linden Labs has is a guideline for how NOT to do completely shit content. Mostly and i'm speaking 90%+ it's the fault of each and every single creator/customer's fault as most of these people either don't care or don't want to bring up some time reading up on the matter and doing some research what's good and what isn't. They simply just slap everything together and blame the Viewer for everything bad that happens.

[AJ]

I absolutely love the idea of Black Dragon and some of the photos I've seen it capable of producing are extraordinary, but there's a few issues I can't get used to, so I won't be using it for the time being.

For instance, there's no in-built AO and apparently won't ever be, so unless you want to regress back to having to using an AO you so carefully picked apart to add the best bits of into your FS AO thingy, then you'll be doing the noob walk all over again.

As for walking with BD - nope. Straifing ain't my thing. Never was, not even when playing World of Warcraft. It's irritating. Strictly a wasd girl here. Don't need the fuss and bother of keybinds (more junk to remember!).

There's no phototools box like FS has, which I've always found incredibly convenient and easy to understand.

With BD, you have to fiddle around with a gazillion settings in a wall of scroll down text/sliders that I frankly don't understand the half of and just don't have the time to deal with.

Then there's the control shift this and control alt that...No. The last thing I need is more technical junk crammed into my oh-so-blonde-brain that has to be remembered just to do the simplest of things.

Nor could I find an option to turn off the damn name that floasts over my head like a noob.

FS may be slower (as the BD creator and others claim), but I didn't see BD upping my fps at all. Not by so much as a single digit. If anything, it was slower than FS (for me).

Those personal grumbles aside, I reiterate that I do very much like the idea of BD - but until it's bimbo-friendly (yes, tech-bimbo here) and has a few more basic functionalities added to it, I'll stick with FS.

[Monody]

"As for walking with BD - nope. Straifing ain't my thing. Never was, not even when playing World of Warcraft. It's irritating. Strictly a wasd girl here."

WASD in most games is strafing, with mouselook being used to turn.

"There's no phototools box like FS has, which I've always found incredibly convenient and easy to understand."

Did you not try pressing F1?

"With BD, you have to fiddle around with a gazillion settings in a wall of scroll down text/sliders that I frankly don't understand the half of and just don't have the time to deal with."

Several major setting groupings have presets to simplify that. The amount of options isn't something you really have to fiddle with, nor should if you aren't at least moderately versed in all the functions of the graphic settings any ways.

"Then there's the control shift this and control alt that...No. The last thing I need is more technical junk crammed into my oh-so-blonde-brain that has to be remembered just to do the simplest of things."

Those are just shortcuts to commands you can generally access from the drop-down menu any ways. Shortcuts that are sometimes common to other browsers, or not offered by other browsers and exist there for convenience to not navigate a menu.

The name visibility setting is literally on the first page of your settings window, you don't even have to scroll down much, if at all, to see it.