New World Notes

How to Make Second Life Look Like It's Cel Shaded à la Borderlands

Because so many readers loved that hack for making Second Life look like a line drawing (someone is already using that to make a "Take on Me" machinima, right?), here's another set of tweaks to make Second Life look like it's cel shaded, as above -- you know, like in the popular Borderlands games. This hack, unsurprisingly, comes from SL graphics master NiranV, creator of the Black Dragon SL viewer. All you have to do, he explains, is adjust SL's screen space ambient occlusion settings: "Set SSAO max scale very low, scale super high, its factor super high and strength super low and viola, you get cel shading via SSAO. For a better effect turn off light softening."

If that's a bit over your head like mine, don't worry -- here's the settings to play with in the Black Dragon viewer, and some tips for doing it in the official viewer:

Watch: How to Make Second Life Look Like an Animated Line Drawing

This is a fantastic visual effect for Second Life created by Kitsune Shan, simply through adjusting settings in the Firestorm viewer: Rendering the virtual world into what looks like an animated line drawing. It screams out for being used in machinima and music videos -- or as Sasy Scarborough put it to me, when she sent this video my way, "Turn name tags off, it would be an amazing short film." Yes.

How to create this effect? Watch the video until the very end, where you see the setting levels she used in the UI. Kitsune figured this out through trial and error noodling:

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:

Black Dragon Comes With Highly Detailed In-Viewer Poser for SL Avatars

Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer with a cult following among hardcore graphics fans, has a relatively unknown feature with a lot of potential uses: In-viewer avatar poser, editing poses with an extremely high and subtle detail, available in the menu via Dragon > My Useful Features > Poser.

"It all started with people wanting a way to synchronize animations like in Firestorm," lead developer NiranV tells me. "I didn't want to implement this as a separate feature. Instead, I made it part of my previous plan of adding a whole animation manipulation suite, which was inspired by my previous 'adjustable slow motion' animation feature."

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 in his viewer:

Animesh Update Reportedly Hurts Performance of All SL Viewers, Including Firestorm -- Linden Lab Investigating

The title to last week's post, "Linden Lab Update Borked Black Dragon's Viewer Frame Rate In Second Life", is not quite accurate, because as Black Dragon creator NiranV writes in Comments, the JIRA bug report he filed, "Animesh: Massive performance loss since animesh update", relates to any viewer which incorporates that update. That includes Firestorm, the most popular viewer among the SL userbase by far. Niran argues it will take awhile for Firestorm users and developers to realize that problem, or implement a fix:

Worst case (as it is right now) no one will notice, since no one hasn't noticed yet even with the huge amount of testing of animesh. Then it will go to Firestorm, Firestorm will be blamed for their shitty stuff once again, and boom everyone got a smack in their face because one single tiny thing slipped through testing.

It might get fixed someday or it might not. Problem is Lindens often don't use the Viewer they are developing enough to make such concrete observations, they are way busy with other stuff like getting this stuff to work in the first place. So it's up to testers to see this stuff.

Problem is because most people use Firestorm they will disregard the possibly lower framerate as it simply being "Linden Lab's Viewer", besides most people testing the Viewer for what it was made = animesh, rather than normal usage.

This causes no one to notice until it hits their own Viewer, which in case of Firestorm, with its extremely long release cycles, could be a problem. Even if they were to notice it shortly after release, you most likely wouldn't see another update until another half a year. Most users will assume that it's simply Firestorm's fault and their usual degradation of quality and performance over several updates -- which if you followed Firestorm's development, you'd think is "normal", meaning you start ignoring the issue, no one might investigate and this thing, will have sneaked into all Viewers, reducing everyone's framerate for no reason.

And this is how fast shit can hit the fan.

Fortunately, Linden Lab has acknowledged the bug report on Jira, and is investigating, and calling for further feedback:

Linden Lab Update Borked Black Dragon's Viewer Frame Rate in Second Life -- Here's Why, And the JIRA to Upvote

Go to this JIRA bug report (BUG-225584) and consider upvoting if you're a fan of Black Dragon, the SL viewer with a cult following for its ability to make Second Life look like a AAA game. Because as you can see from the above video, shot be lead creator NiranV, a recent SL viewer codebase update will utterly kill Black Dragon's frame rate when displaying the viewers' new animesh features.

"I imagine chaos and mass panic when this goes live and everyone is having complete shit framerates," as Niran bluntly puts it." 

The problem? That's pretty technical (definitely for me) so let me just quote him:

Black Dragon Second Life Viewer Adds Full Animesh Support With Custom Animation Control - Great Tool for Machinima, Group Shots

Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer with a cult following among hardcore graphics fans, has a new update that will likely make it a favorite among machinima makers and screenshot photogrpahers who want to create group shots: Full support for animated mesh avatars, i.e. animesh. Being the brainchild of NiranV, Black Dragon's version of animesh is unique among other SL viewers -- direct control of animesh via a control UI he's created:

"Any viewer with animesh can do it via scripts," as Niran tells me, "but Black Dragon can also simply copy all animations playing on yourself to any animesh." This is viewable only via the user's perceptive, but that's all you need when shooting machinima or screenshots. "I'm planning to use this for music videos," he adds. "Who needs other people if you can just do it with yourself, a few times making copies of myself is possible now kinda."

More about the Animation Control from Niranv's blog, and future update plans:

Yes you can stop, freeze, slow-down, speed-up and copy and paste animations from and onto them. Since they are just objects I see no reason LL would not allow me to allow you to do whatever the heck you want with them.

The poser however does not support animated mesh YET. This is the next thing I'm going to work on in addition to some nice extra features for animated mesh, such as copying your shape and attachments to them.

Animated mesh as it is right now does not support neither, they won't have attachments and their shape cannot be changed, I plan on changing that. 

Here's a video of what this looks like in action, featuring Niran dancing with a copy of himself:

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.

Linden Lab's Project Sunshine Promises Faster Avatar Loading in Second Life - But Can They Deliver?

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Yesterday Linden Lab announced Project Sunshine, a viewer update that is part of an ongoing initiative to identify and address problems with streaming and loading content (like avatars, objects, and textures) in Second Life, known as Project Shining. Several third-party viewers (including Firestorm) are already compatible with Project Sunshine, meaning that you may not necessarily need to change your viewer of choice to see the benefits... Though you'll still need to update. 

But wait! There's more...

Future Phoenix Viewer Development in Peril?

Tonya Souther, a leading developer for the Phoenix Viewer, a third party viewer for Second Life that's far more popular than the official SL viewer, on her blog suggests that future development of Phoenix may be in peril. This is due to some recent technical changes Linden Lab is making to future viewer development, which she also explains in the post, but the upshot for her is this:

[W]hat I'm about to say is my own personal opinion, and not that of the Phoenix Viewer Project. The group has not made any decisions yet. To me, it's time to say that we are not going to put any more effort into Phoenix... As far as I'm concerned, it's time to put Phoenix to rest. The developers don't like working in the codebase, as in many ways it's an unmaintainable tissue of hacks, the support team barely remembers how to run it, and Firestorm now provides essentially all of the function Phoenix has and much more besides.

Read it all here. If I'm reading right, Phoenix fans will have to transition to Firestorm, the most updated version of the Phoenix Viewer Project viewers, which may make some Phoenix fans' phlegm fly.