New World Notes

Open Source VR Viewer for OpenSim in Development -- Low Cost Alternative for Social VR Projects?

Interesting project now in development within the community of OpenSim, the open source/reverse engineered version of Second Life:

OpenSimulator core developer Melanie Thielker — also known as Melanie Milland in-world — announced that she is releasing her virtual reality OpenSim viewer to the open source community, available here via GitHub. The new viewer uses the Unreal Engine to display OpenSim regions, such as areas from the grid Thielker founded, Avination.

While OpenSim never took off as a consumer-facing project, it counts thousands of developers and dedicated members, many within the education community, and counts thousands of regions/3D experiences. So this could potentially be a good, low budget/low frills alternative for indie social VR projects. Though the technical effort to make this possible seem fairly daunting -- porting OpenSim content into the Unreal engine:

Black Dragon Update: Control Multiple Animated Avatars at the Same Time

Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer with a cult following among hardcore graphics fans (developer NiranV estimates about 3000+ downloads), has a new version available for download: "Animating Dragon".

As that suggests, the latest updates enables this: "The ability to use poses to animate not just yourself but also Animesh now. Previously I added posing for Animesh but you could still only animate either you or them [Animesh-based NPCs) and only one at a time," as he explains to me. "Now you can animate everyone independently and/or at the same time."

So basically, this is a major boon for machinima makers and fashionistas who want to take supermodel shots where they want to control the supermodel too. (Just for starters.)

Video of Animating Dragon in action below. More about it on NiranV's blog (where you can also get the download link). 

Niran, by the way, has a Patreon for developing Black Dragon, and donations sure seem well-deserved. I mean, just look at what he's doing all by himself on his viewer:

How to Understand Black Dragon: Tips & Design Notes from the Creator of the Amazing, Unconventional Second Life Viewer

Pics in this post via ellapinellapin's Flickr of untouched Black Dragon images

To judge by the response of NWN posts this like, there's growing SL user interest in Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer which makes SL look like a AAA videogame in terms of graphics detail and framerate. That also means some growing SL user confusion, because Black Dragon's approach to the software is quite different than Firestorm, the most popular viewer, let alone Linden Lab's official viewer. Fortunately, Black Dragon creator Niran V recently stopped by New World Notes to give some tips and background on his design methodology. For instance, on user preferences:

Overall I've spent 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)…

And here's Niran's response to confusion over Black Dragon's display looking too dark -- and user resistance to the default WASD controls:

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.

"It is so inconvenient to use WASD with mouse to walk around" is quite new [a complaint]. 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 de facto 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...

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.

Most fascinating to me is where Niran discusses his own frustrations with user complaints over updates to his viewer (which he creates and gives away for free):

What SL Screenshots Look Like When Taken in the Black Dragon Viewer

Via ellapinellapin's Flickr

There's been lots of interest in my post about how Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer, can make SL look like a AAA videogame in terms of graphics detail and framerate. Reader Ella points out it's also great for screenshots, and comes with a Poser tool that helps with selfie pics. By way of evidence, here's her Flickr page with pics all taken with Black Dragon, without any post-processing, as she explains on her About page:

The photos I take within Second Life are taken at up to 6K resolution within the Black Dragon viewer. Photos are resized to 50% to reduce resolution and size of file for upload to Flickr. Downscaling these photos from such a large resolution adds a sense of clarity (but not excessively) to the picture. I consider this an exception and it helps the appearance of SL in general. Third-party tools/addons such as ReShade are not used and photos are not manipulated unless noted in the description.

Still skeptical? Here's some more pics by Ella that seriously rock:

Still more below!

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:

Black Dragon SL Viewer Adds UI-Free Animator & Bone Focus Features

Here's a fun and flashy little video from NiranV Dean, creator of Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer with a cult following due to its amazing graphics and fast frame rate, which shows off two new features: a UI-free animator and the ability to keep the camera focused on a specific avatar bone. As he explains on Reddit:

[For] the falling scene I wanted the camera to perfectly follow my avatar, in order to do so I needed a new feature that I wanted for quite a while, so while allowing a bigger position change on the pelvis I also implemented a feature that allows tracking bones... The video shows both the new animator that can continue working without UI as well as the new bone focus feature in action.

Very handy features for SL machinima creators, especially.

Why It's So Hard to Create a Successful Successor to Second Life (Comment of the Week)

Good conversation on OpenSim's struggle to become a viable consumer product capped by this comment from reader "Pulsar":

For years Opensim attracted some because of the lower prices, larger regions and other features like that. But after a while, you see those who tried that, go back to Second Life (only few stay or stay in both).

Why? Usually the answers are: «My friends are in SL» and «...all the inventory I have too» and they have to restart from zero [in OpenSim]. The inventory maybe isn't the bigger deal (not to mention those who resort to copybotting, although that won't get the scripts), but given how many people use SL for social things, you have the old issue: People stay where people are. For the same reason it has always been hard to make a popular alternative to Facebook or Whatsapp (or MSN messenger before), until either something game-changing comes (e.g. the advent of smartphones and tablets) and/or you offer something new that works well enough (e.g. Instagram). Therefore a SL clone would have an hard time, no matter the good features.

There's been several attempts to create a Second Life successor -- Cloud Party was showing promise, until Yahoo! gobbled it up a few years ago, where it remains, presumably undigested somewhere its corpulent innards -- but none have really gained traction as yet. Pulsar has a theory why:

Lumiya, Second Life Viewer For Android Devices, Sells Over 100,000 Copies

Lumiya, the popular SL viewer for Android devices, has become quite popular. Since adding support for Bento-based avatars last year, the third party viewer created and published by Aline Lyvette went from purchases in the five figures to six figures -- according to Google Play, it's been purchased and installed over 100,000 times. Which suggests this incredible stat: 1 in 6 active Second Life users already own Lumiya.

Very, very, very few premium apps earn that many downloads, especially with Lumiya selling for $2.99. I continue to be stunned that Linden Lab hasn't offered to buy Lumiya outright from Alina, or just went ahead and hired her. (Then again, maybe they couldn't afford her.) But this clearly illustrates heavy demand for a mobile version of Second Life. Roughly 70% of smartphone owners have an Android, so the total potential market for Lumiya (or another Android-based SL viewer) is probably in the 200-300K range.  

Here's a fun (and not uncritical) walkthrough of Lumiya by an SL YouTuber:

Tutorial: How to Custom Edit Your Own Second Life Skies (Mac Edition)

There's been lots of interest in Stevie Davros' Custom Skies now in the SL Marketplace, so here's Stevie's step-by-step tutorial video for updating the default SL skies in your viewer to those custom-made by him or anyone else, for that matter. This tutorial is specifically for the Mac version of the viewer, but Stevie tells me the process for Windows should more or less be the same, except more Windows-ish. (Hopefully Windows users can post some tips in Comments.)

Firestorm Update: Popular 3rd Party Viewer for SL Includes Havok Physics Improvements, Cornucopia of Tweaks

Firestorm, the volunteer-run third party viewer that's by far the most popular software for using Second Life (more popular, in fact, than the official viewer put out by Linden Lab itself) has a new, long-awaited update with many updates and fixes to many features. Here's the summary, with the most interesting, substantial updates probably being physics-related:

• Fixes for avatar physics bugging out at very low or very high FPS
  A long awaited fix to have you wiggling and jiggling at your very best.
• Firestorm 5.0.11 64 bit Windows & Mac versions now have Havok support thanks to Linden Lab!
• Added the ability to view an object’s physics shape in edit mode

Go here to download the new version, though before you do, you might first want to watch the tutorial video below, for backing up settings and doing a clean install. 

More details in the release notes, including this bit on the physics:

Firestorm was the first viewer to bring you the extra stability and memory profile of the 64-bit viewer, but until now that has been at the expense of one feature, the Havok libraries supplied by Linden Lab. As a result of the work that the Lab have done on their Alex Ivy 64-bit project, we are now able to bring you the long-anticipated, Havok-enabled 64-bit Firestorm, once again restoring all the functionality of the 32-bit viewer but keeping the stability and speed of the 64-bit viewer. Many of you will not have noticed anything missing, but for builders and those using features such as pathfinding, the lack of Havok limited certain functions. The most notable area was mesh upload.
Firestorm never lost the ability to upload mesh (contrary to many incorrect rumors) but what Havok does provide is a few special functions that allow a mesh creator to optimize the physics shape of their works. This has now been fully restored to the 64-bit viewer. To celebrate this, Beq Janus, one of our developers has created a special physics-shape–viewing extension to the edit dialog. For creators, this means that you can now see exactly how your mesh will react to people walking and colliding with it, while for other users, it means you can check whether a physics shape exists before trying to rez an object, saving those “cannot rez here” messages and lost inventory.
Linden Lab, Ansariel Hiller (Windows), Tonya Souther (Mac)

Havok physics are pretty much the industry standard, included in countless 3D games, so expect to get better performance and responsiveness, and machinima that looks much more believable.

Install tutorial after the break: