New Black Dragon Viewer Update Makes SL Look Like a AAA Game

There's a new update to Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer with a cult following due to its amazing graphics and fast frame rate. Creator NiranV Dean lays out the top highlights here:

Besides fixing the broken group chat behavior options, a crash when trying to toggle borderless window mode off while in login screen, enter key not working properly in keybinding dialogs among some other minor things this update comes with a revamped Media-on-a-Prim floater.

So mostly minor technical fixes. The major reason for trying out Black Dragon, as always, is if you got a PC powerful enough to handle it, the viewer makes Second Life look like what you're seeing above (also shot by NiranV) -- a AAA videogame on the order of Fallout 4 or perhaps more appropriate a comparison in this case, the Dead Space series.

Yes, Second Life has a comparable experience to those horror sci-fi games:

It's called, of course, Dead Space, which has existed in some form for around a decade, and according to recent reports, now exists in Gibson, SL's oldest cyberpunk sim. (Yes, named after William.) 

Comments

[ella]

I really enjoy this viewer for photo snapping. The Poser tool is super useful for self shots, too. Here's some photos I've taken with it.

https://flic.kr/ps/3czkZY

[Blarg Yargison]

I remember when Gibson guitar had a sim too. I grabbed every guitar they offered.

[SilverS]

Sadly this viewer don't even want to launch on my PC, no idea why :(

[NiranV]

@SilverS

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.

@Post

The SIM is also known as "Doomed Ship" and is indeed very old (i think around a decade now) making it one of the oldest RP SIMs still "alive", alive as in still there, not often visited but still available.

It should be noted though that Doomed Ship is by far not one of the fanciest places, i'd rank it pretty low on the "fancy SIM" list. Quite a lot of it is still built with old prims and its age shows a lot. Most of it's decent look comes from the atmosphere and lighting not necessarily the place itself.

[Masami Kuramoto]

Umm... sorry, but the only things that could make SL look like a AAA game is a modern PBR shader pipeline with global illumination, light probes, GLSL support etc. — along with TONS OF CONTENT actually using these features efficiently! None of these things is going to materialize any time soon. It's a common misconception to think that a shiny new viewer is all it takes to magically make dated SL content look good. At this point most SL content creators haven't even figured out how to make use of the previous overhaul of the materials system.

[JuiccyNicole]

Can someone help with black dragon, I have bbl on secondlife it’s work great till I logged in recently and my body is grey. My hands, feet and hand are okay it’s just the body itself and I cleared as well.