If You're Having Trouble Launching the Black Dragon SL Viewer on Your PC, The Creator Has Some Tips

From ellapinellapin's Flickr

Last week's posts about Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer that makes SL look like a AAA videogame and is a dream for taking great screenshots, were the most popular by far -- which means many readers are trying out Dragon right now. Which also mean some of them are sometimes having trouble even launching it on their PC. Fortunately, Black Dragon creator NiranV is in NWN comments to help out:

This could be due to 2 reasons:

1. Your CPU does not support AVX (Advanced Vector Extension) thus cannot run the latest version. Choose the version without "AVX" in its name.
2. Your Windows is not 64bit and thus cannot run neither of the latest two 64bit versions. Choose the version without "64x" in its name.

Hopefully that helps! The image above, by the way, was shot using Black Dragon's keyboard controlled camera roll. I.E., Dutch angles, i.e. not only does Black Dragon make SL look like a AAA game, it also helps you make Second Life images and video look like they were shot by a fancy ass film director.

Comments

[Kenz]

It look like video game graphic, but it a bit over dark. Generally spesking is all acceptable, but using experience is really bad. It is so inconveience to use wsda with mouse to walk around. Nor it is comfortable to use arrows. I also want to have easier WL control. And the menu design is not good too. Hard for user discover at first sight. I am curios why we cannot design mouse has two modes : edit mode and moving mode. So we can use one mouse moving avatar around like WoW.

[NiranV]

@Kenz

1) Brightness is a complex topic, everyone uses a different monitor (or TV like in my case), your screen settings and even your color settings play a vital role in how everything looks in the end. On top of your monitor settings, Viewer settings also play a big role, what kind of graphic settings are enabled, how are they configured and then on top of that there are also windlight settings, every windlight is different and customizing it means there are uncountable numbers of extra possibilities how dark or bright a part of a whole scene can be. Generally speaking however the Viewer settings were built with "Deferred Rendering", "Shadows", "Tone Mapping" and "Color Correction" enabled at the very least. Failing to enable any of these settings will completely change how colors and specifically how bright or dark the world in the Viewer looks. The default settings are matched for my setup and my color/brightness settings because i think i've set up a good color/brightness preset in my monitor (using online color diagrams and whatnot to properly configure it). It is also noteworthy that the Viewer is meant to be used with a full color range enabled, this is by default disabled (for NVidia GPU's) in the driver settings because most monitors are not configured to view the full color range properly and because most people find it annoying when full darkness actually shows as complete pitch black darkness rather than bright-greyish/dark, this goes both ways, white will be real white, meaning a bright background like those in browsers will be much brighter and might be blinding if you're not used to it.

2) The use(r) experience is a very complex topic topic too. Most importantly user experience is as the name suggests a user-specific thing, it is different for everyone but generally speaking and without trying to sound like an asshole here: "most people are simply too lazy to get used to something that is even slightly different". This all the more true in Second Life where it seems like a dangerously big part of the entire SL community has build up extreme resistance against any kind of change. Whenever i touch the UI someone starts shouting from around a corner "OMG NOT AGAIN" without reading the changes or even trying to understand what they do. (Last example of this was my latest update where Nalates immediately commented this with a comment in her blog that implied she wasn't all too happy about seeing UI changes again even though these UI changes did not change anything she'll ever see). The user experience is a very complex topic and making it work for most people without dumbing it down to LL or Firestorm levels (seeing as they throw notifications at you at every corner and naming options for idiots: "Advanced Lighting Model" which tells you jack shit what it is and doesn't allow you to read up on it but rather just hopes that it gives you a general "idea" what this entail). I've spend more time than i can count trying to deliver something usable without filling your screen, without resorting to handholding and handfeeding you all while making it look somewhat consistent and still functionally good and easily understandable. If the UI is too complex in BD but not in FS then something is horribly wrong with the way you go on to things. In comparison, i could always switch to any Viewer, regardless of its version, UI, skin or whatever, over the past i've used pretty much every major Viewer at least once and i never felt like i'm lost or that the UI is too complex.

3) "It is so inconvenient to use WASD with mouse to walk around" is quite new, i haven't heard this before but let me tell you that if you find moving with keyboard and looking around with mouse "inconvenient" then i'm honestly concerned on how you use/used your computer in the past. Using keyboard for movement controls whilst using mouse for camera is not inconvenient it is the defacto standard established long ago which has gone through games and applications alike, it is only natural to use both to properly and precisely move around. Not a joke but just today i was yelling at a friend because of exactly this topic: Many people don't seem to know even the most basic form of movement controls in Second Life, moving with keyboard and mouse, probably not even that mouse is also used to zoom around. I was making fun of it by trying to "emulate" the way these people move around, walking a few steps, stopping to turn around then continuing to walk a few steps before stopping to turn again, before i realised that this wasn't funny but rather a sad state of things in Second Life. When i joined Second Life you couldn't even leave the starting island without knowing alt-cam and the basic keyboard and mouse controls... i wonder what the new user experience is nowadays but it certainly isn't showing people how to control their avatar.

3.1) I should mention that the Viewer offers the ability to fully customize the controls to your liking, if you don't like the controls, change them, it's not hard to understand how that works with a little bit of testing in worst case.

4) Not sure how much "easier" Windlight control can get but as far as i can remember the Windlight editors look and work exactly the same across all Viewers +- a bit of a spacing difference.

5) The "Menu Design", whatever you mean by that...

If you mean the actual "menu" at the top left, it is a mix of a Viewer 1 styled menu as well as the Viewer 2 menu, namely old categories (e.g File, Edit, World, Tools etc) have been taken over as they make perfect sense and if following a menu structure you are basically building sentences:
Dragon - Edit - Preferences
is like saying
"Black Dragon! Edit the preferences!"

Another example:
Dragon - World - Sun - Midday
is like saying
"Black Dragon! Change the world sun to midday!"

This works with a simple concept. You form a sentence of what you want to do and follow this with keywords: I want to edit settings of Black Dragon, hence click the "Dragon" menu. I want to "edit" something, hence click the "Edit" submenu. I want to edit my profile, hence click the "Profile" entry. This isn't hard to understand at all nor is it hard to use, most Viewers use a similar menu structure. Especially Firestorm.

If you mean the general layout of windows such as preferences, people, inventory and such. Pretty much all windows, this includes Picks, Panels, People, Inventory, Appearance/Outfits have a very similar layout to that of other Viewers, these have hardly gotten big changes, most of them involve smaller spacing fixes, consistency fixes and general smaller ugliness fixes that made things look out-of-place. The biggest difference here is preferences although many options in preferences can still be found in the same tabs as in most other Viewers (not counting Firestorm here) that is unless these tabs have been removed (such as the "Move and View" tab which has been changed back to the "Camera" tab and "Controls" tab as they made much more sense), only very few options have been moved around, mostly options that weren't a preferences setting before anyway, usually BD specific options but also a small handful of generic options that didn't fit quite in their tab. Overall i've spend years in preferences to organize it and give an ever growing amount of settings a consistent feeling, having all options logically categorized, all of them looking almost identical, using proper labels, having long descriptions to explain what they do, getting rid of input ways that made it harder for the user to understand what is going on (do you know what LOD 4 means? In comparison do you know what Object Quality High means? Object Quality is much more telling and "High" is something everyone understands, "4" is not)

6) Again i'd like to note that there is an option to change the mouse controls to an old-school MMO behavior where you click-to-move around which can be found in preferences.

Overall you just confirmed what i said that people are too lazy to get used to something a bit different, judging from your comment about the controls and the mouse movement you haven't even spend those few minutes looking through preferences to see if any of your complains can be changed/fixed at all. These kind of responses make me sad but what makes me even more sad is that i had to show up here and write this book.

[Mi]

This new black dragon don't work with neither of the two updates. That sucks

[jordann]

this new version of black dragon 3.9 sucks. i cant get this to open to save my life. i am just getting the black screen of death on startup.