Last week's most popular post by far is this one about how the Black Dragon viewer now has a setting to take 12,000 by 12,000 images of Second Life. So clearly many were interested in that option. However, this also provoked reader comments like "4K is generally good enough for screenshots" and, of course, "Why?" (The obvious answer to the latter being, of course, Why the hell not?)
Black Dragon creator NiranV posted a comment going deep into his own sense of Why:
I did it because people wanted it and it was literally a 10 second number change that doesn't impact the Viewer in any way and doesn't add any bloat and fits into what the Viewer is aimed at.
I told people that it's quite pointless but some peeps were like, "but more pixels!"
But what do you need to pixels for?
"More pixels!"
Yea well that's fine and all but what for, 4K + FXAA is perfectly fine.
"But i already run the Viewer at 4K natively, it looks like trash."
NiranV proceeds to unleash a hilarious rant that's also an insight into a day in the life of a third party viewer developer attempting to serve the needs of their user community
Wait what how do you run it at 4K and it looks like shit. You are essentially seeing what we see when we take a 4K shot and downscale it to fit our 1080p screen. Even worse, i use a huge 40" TV screen, this thing has a crazy bad pixel density, I can count every single pixel thats how huge they are and you are telling me seriously that your, what is it, maybe 27" PC monitor which automatically already has a smaller pixel density and thus less aliased image if you are using the same 1080p resolution as me, looks worse even when on 4K which is easily double the pixel amount in the same space? How the hell does that even work?!
I mean if you are not satisfied with double the resolution on a smaller area then honestly you'll never be satisfied with no resolution. Heck if anything i should complain, my TV is freaking huge, i can count every single pixel on screen, imagine how bad my aliasing is when i turn off FXAA. When i take a picture at 4K and scale it down to 1080p its perfectly smooth and i can tell because i can count every single pixel, if there was aliasing ANYWHERE I'd immediately see it.
"BUT MUH PIXELS!"
Yeah well I guess your pixels.
And then I unlocked the resolution limit and everyone started complaining. WHY?! YOU wanted it, first you complain that you can't take pictures at resolutions higher than 6K and now you're complaining that i did change it and allow you to take snapshots up to 12K? WTH.
Honestly I don't get it, no matter what you do, people will always complain, every time... and people are seriously still wondering why I "seem" to be ignoring most people's feedback. Like... THIS is why.
I guess the real takeaway is this: If you want to request Niran make some changes to the viewer, however superfluous, how about first subscribe to his Patreon, and pay him for that pleasure?
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