New World Notes

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:

Black Dragon, Second Life's Groundbreaking Viewer, In Danger of Dying Due to Creator's Family & Financial Crisis

Click here to consider supporting via Patreon future updates to Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer with a cult following for how it optimizes and enhances the virtual world's graphics and for its unique, groundbreaking features, such as a highly detailed in-viewer poser. Supported by a single developer, known in-world as NiranV, Black Dragon's future is now in question due to financial shortfall and family crisis. As Niran writes on his blog:

[W]ith some Patreons jumping off due to financial reasons and more and more real life "issues" arising, the money is simply not enough anymore. Not enough as in, I can pay the Internet bills and still have a tiny little bit for me to get some food if the need arises. However, with my parents getting older and them reaching an age at which the risk of them... "suddenly poofing" is getting dangerously high, they have been "gently pushing me" towards thinking of how I'm supposed to pay the bills when they can't anymore. Needless to say the obvious answer is "get a job" and that is exactly where the problems start. If I get a job I can basically guarantee you that Black Dragon is dead. 

Emphasis mine, because it bears emphasizing. Fortunately, Niran recently added some extra Patreon benefits, including a low-priced option to put your SL brand and link to your Marketplace right on the viewer's front page -- a great advertising option for hardcore SL content creators who use Black Dragon. (Right now, upwards of 7000 installed users, Niran tells me.)

Check out Niran's Black Dragon Discord for more details -- that's where I got these images above below, showing off his viewer in all its AAA-looking glory:

Why Black Dragon's In-Viewer Poser is Better Than Any HUD for Taking SL Avatar Photos

This is a fun livestream of beloved SL YouTuber Cassie posing her avatar through Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer with a cult following for its high end graphics features. Among those features is what Cassie is showing here -- an ability to pose and photograph your avatar with an extremely high degree of complexity. The end result is only viewable (and photographable) by the end user, but seeing as most SL fashion shoots are already a solo avatar affair, that's a minor consideration. (It can also be used for couple poses if you launch it in a couple animation -- though again, only viewable/photographable by the individual user.)

Black Dragon creator NiranV tells me his poser enables adjustments over 300 avatar points with 1000 adjustment options each. His motivation for creating such a complex viewer-only poser? As he puts it to me in his usual blunt way:

"Get rid of people selling shitty, overpriced HUDs to people to pose themselves."

And then explains what he means by that:

Watch: How to Use Black Dragon, the SL Viewer With Great Graphics Options But a Challenging User Interface

Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer, has a cult following among hardcore graphics fans, but many SLers complain that its user interface for everything besides graphics is, well, challenging.

"It’s worth noting that while I think Black Dragon is unbeatable for visuals in Second Life, it’s not as easy for just about anything else," as blogger Mericat Ireland notes. "Communicating, getting changed etc. is all a bit more difficult than with other viewers (although entirely possible)." That in mind, Mericat shot this tutorial/walkthrough above, and opened up her blog to questions from other Black Dragon users.

It should be noted that none of the SL viewers, including (especially?) the official Linden Lab-created viewer, are user friendly, which is a key reason why roughly 99.9% of new users quickly leave. So really, we're just talking about which set of complex commands you prefer to learn/tolerate.

As for whether it's worth learning how to use Black Dragon, here's a sample of what it looks like in action, in a machinima created by Black Dragon creator NiranV:

Second Life Really Needs to Switch to a New 3D Engine (Rant of the Week)

Left and right: From August, bakes on mesh when using the updated SL viewer... and a 3rd party viewer at the time (as featured here, photos by Rhonda Huntress via this thread) 

Great discussion last week verging on a rant in this post about the gradual, imperfect efforts by Linden Lab and the community to adapt Bakes on Mesh to Second Life content. An anonymous reader suggests the fundamental problem is far larger that that patch:

This really always comes down to Linden not doing its job, just trying to push its work on others.

New engine
New engine
New engine

If their current employees can't do it, then... get people who can or lease an engine that works the best with your files. It's 2019 and you're trying to constantly stitch together a 2003 engine time and time again. I'm pretty sure when the engine was made in '03 they couldn't even think of ray tracing,GPU Power, virtual reality, peer to peer, or even blockchain. All we can keep doing is fighting 'cause the company is lazy, and keeps saying downgrade downgrade back to '03.

There is no incentive for mesh body creators and clothes makers to update in Second Life. They don't get monthly payments from their customers , so it's really just you don't like it, "thanks for the fish" mentality. It's said in the Slink group chat everyday.

BOM won't be truly a WTF moment till the next Bento update comes up and they have to update their bodies to "BOM versions that are downgrades" and they say, oh yeah we stopped supporting your body that you paid for and liked for system avatar 2.0.

There's definitely a sense where upgrades like Bakes on Mesh and Bento feel like welding Ferrari chassis parts on a car with a Model T motor. In any case, another reader argues that Anonymous' points "don't appreciate the difficulty of upgrading a system that has been in almost non-stop operation for sixteen years and where upgrades need to get it right on first or second bounce as rollbacks may cause bigger problems than they solve." Which is also true, but here's Anon's reply:

Linden Lab Couldn't Take Over Firestorm Without Killing Firestorm

The third party Firestorm viewer is used by about 90% of the regular Second Life user base, making any update to Second Life basically irrelevant until it's compatible with Firestorm. So that means Linden Lab should just hire the all-volunteer Firestorm team, right? Wrong, argues Bavid Dailey in Comments:

If Linden Lab were to take over the Firestorm viewer, they'd break it. Corporations do things differently to how volunteer groups do. Nothing kills developer enthusiasm better than meetings. I have no direct knowledge of how the Firestorm team works, but I hazard a guess that there are a minimal number of meetings. Also, Firestorm volunteers know that they are focused on a clear objective. Corporations tend to have other agendas, and upper management tends to change agendas without consultation, right of appeal - or much logic in many cases. Don't kill the goose that lays golden eggs. Perhaps toss them some gold filings from time to time....

This sounds right, which would mean that we are stuck in our current state: Highly profitable Linden Lab being totally dependent on non-profit volunteers. But yes, agree with the "gold filings" point. When is Linden Lab going to throw the Firestorm team an all-expenses-paid Thank You party at Linden's HQ in San Francisco?