New World Notes

Black Dragon SL Viewer Gets UI Upgrade, New Feature for Avatar Animations

Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer with a cult following among hardcore graphics fans, has a new update that should improve its usability --  "Fancy new tooltips, some UI improvements," creator NiranV tells me -- and comes with a new feature with a lot of potential for screenshots and machinima:

Watch: Will Second Life's New AWS Cloud Deployment Improve Performance?

Linden Lab is starting to test a new deployment of Second Life running on the Amazon Web Services cloud, beginning with a copy of Blake Sea on the Second Life Preview Grid (known as Aditi)  -- and virtual world explorer Nodoka Hanamura just arrived from the sea with this video, putting the cloud through its paces in many vehicles. (Action starts at around 1:30 in.)

The most notable result? Near-seamless sim crossing, a much-desired but near-elusive goal. As you'll see in the video, there's a split-second pause when traveling from one sim to another, resembling what it looks like in many open world games -- as opposed to the several seconds or more rubber band-ing mess it's usually like in SL.

Frame rate, Nodoka tells me, what's fairly decent: 

Amazing Untouched Environmental Photos Shot in SL With Black Dragon

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

It’s been a while since Loverdag has been featured here. Because her work is so distinctive, I thought I must have already done a post about her. She is one of my favorite SL artists. But I so loved this unedited photo “Dream Village” that I decided to search to see if it’s been over a year, and tadah! I haven’t written about her at all. So what makes me love this? It’s probably not intentional but she captures the lighting before a hailstorm. The clouds are cirrus, the fair weather clouds, but the dark sky with the light so intense and slightly yellow is a sign of hail. With the high winds, the leaning telephone pole, and the precarious buildings that could be dismantled by high winds and it gave me that exhilarating feeling I would sometimes get right before a storm. I can almost smell the freshness of the air. 

More stunning landscapes below -- as with the one above, taken with the Black Dragon viewer without post-processing.

Readers Review the Alchemy Viewer for SL

Demo video by Pepe Kuno, who notes: "Finally smooth. Firestorm was killing me with the lag.

Last week's most socially shared post by far is this one on the third party SL viewer known as Alchemy, which suggests to me that many are looking for an alternative to the popular Firestorm viewer. Readers weigh in on the pros and cons:

I decided to give the Alchemy beta release a try-out after watching Luca's [demo] video. (I'm on a 2017 iMac 27".) It is definitely more responsive in large areas, as texture loading seems to be handled better compared to Firestorm. And my FPS have been higher in the areas I usually visit. While it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Firestorm - and is missing some Firestorm features like parcel-level WindLights and the built-in pose stand - overall I've had no problems using it as my primary viewer for Second Life. Sadly, there are fewer options for Mac users these days, with Kokua being the only other relatively up-to-date option besides Firestorm and the official SL Viewer. - Posted by: Spiffy Voxel 

Contrary to that, a reader named "Lemmy" reports: "I tried using my recent MacBook Pro, and I’m getting half the framerate I would using Firestorm." So apparently Mac mileage may vary.

Another reader has some tips on using Alchemy on a PC:

Alchemy Viewer Reportedly Improves SL Performance 2-3X Over Firestorm

I'm not too familiar with Alchemy, a third party SL viewer registered on the official Wiki, but YouTuber Luca says (and shows, above) how well it performs versus Firestorm (the most popular SL viewer) -- assuming you have a powerful GPU.

"I get about 2-3x the performance," Luca tells me. "But generally from people who reported that they got improvement from it, they usually got like 2x the performance! Some people said they didn't get any at all, though."

So the difference seems to vary widely from PC to PC. As Luca goes on:

The Problem With a 12,000 x 12,000 Second Life Display -- And With Asking for It From an Unpaid Third Party Viewer Developer (Comment of the Week)

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

Black Dragon Viewer Now Lets You Take Second Life Screenshots in 12,000K -- If Your Hardware Can Handle It!

The Black Dragon viewer for Second Life is beloved for making the ancient and venerable virtual world look like a modern AAA game, but the latest update, "Enhancing Dragon" takes that to an entirely ridiculous level. As creator NiranV explains on his blog:

Finally because some people have been nagging about this i've raised the maximum snapshot resolution to 12K. Yes. 12K. 12000x12000. This is mostly for GTX 10XX cards and I doubt that you'll get too many shots in with lower cards before the Viewer decides to poop its render pants and explode in a giant mess. 

Click the pic on the post if you don't believe me. (Though clicking might also cause your browser to poop its pants.) 

Also, only try this if you have an excellent GPU. As NiranV warns:

Kirsten's Viewer, Which Displays Second Life in 3D, Gets Major Update

If you have the right kind of glasses and you want to experience Second Life in 3D, Kirstens' Viewer has a brand new update you can download here (for Windows). Though overshadowed by Firestorm and Black Dragon in recent years, Kirstenlee Cinquetti's third party client for Second Life has been among the very best of its kind, but it also hasn't been updated in quite awhile. But as Kirsten explained to me in an IM, the quarantine lockdown gave her time to do a major update as explained on her blog:

For those of you with red/cyan glasses the above screenshot will make perfect sense :)
The code for this has been completely re-written the reason for this is simple, the effect is the system now renders at native frame rates! Previously each eye had to render the entire scene and required viewer display having duplicate coding resulting in quite a performance hit. The system is now integrated much more elegantly and some selected components only render on alternate frames.

More info here. So that's one more positive outcome to this incredibly horrible pandemic.

Philip Rosedale, SLers and Me Tweet About Overhauling Second Life's UX/UI & Whether Third Party Viewers Could Do It

Hiring a 5 person team of great UI/UX designers with a game industry background to fix Second Life’s vexing user interface & 1st time user experience would have cost about $5 million.

Instead, Linden Lab spent about $50 million developing Sansar.

Which they just gave away. https://t.co/KKNqGQmkl6

— Wagner James Au (@slhamlet) March 28, 2020

If you're on Twitter you may enjoy reading or contributing to a tweet thread I started over the weekend (I blame quarantine fever) by somewhat ranting about the opportunity cost of spending so much on Sansar when a fraction of that budget could have been spent on overhauling Second Life's first time user experience and user interface. Philip Rosedale comments, as do several other smart SLers with developer chops.

If You Like Second Life, You'll Like the Black Dragon Viewer (Comment of the Week #2)

From Ellapinellapin's retired but indispensable Flickr devoted to untouched Black Dragon screenshots

My plea to support via Patreon pledges future updates to Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer created by NiranV, was as fine as it goes -- but reader "Lone Dubratt" expressed it more elegant than me in Comments:

If you like Second Life you like Black Dragon.

I've always seen it as that second viewer. The camera and UI is different, and for people set in their ways that's a bad thing. That's not what Black Dragon is about, though. Black Dragon is an alternative, THE alternative to a stagnant SL viewer. It's cutting edge, ground breaking, everything the SL viewer (for some absurd reason) isn't.

Firestorm is most popular, it's the middle ground. Some neat features atop ye olde reliable SL viewer. There'd be no future for SL without a cutting edge, Niran's work has at times dragged Second Life forward when nothing else will. It's the second viewer you use when you want to see things at their prettiest. When you want things to run at their fastest. When you want a taste of what SL can, and should be. It's your holiday from the comfort of the simple and known. Your view into what future SL or Firestorm viewers [could] or at times should become. Very often, it very much is the future (by which I mean, other viewers 'acquire' from Niran's open source code, perhaps without so much as a mention they used his work).

And really that first line nails it. Second Life's graphics and architecture have been showing its age for well over a decade, and the UI and UX remaining vexing as fuck. But it's also open enough that a lone individual --and it's often one person, and they're often cranky or at the least eccentric!) -- can dig into its guts, look at it like no one else has before, and create miracles.

It's why Black Dragon is an ongoing project that reminds me of Second Life in its glory days: