Black Dragon Viewer

[NiranV Dean]

Another test release, this ones mainly about sliders. I made a very "risky" change with sliders, which should make them all consistent across a lot of UI parts, namely the entirety of Preferences and the sidebar for instance, if you find any slider anywhere that is invisible, doesn't have a slide or doesn't have text when it clearly should, report it. I fixed all i came across but with 100+ windows scattered everywhere there surely are places i missed.

This is how it should look now:

If you find sliders having inconsistent widths, being too short (leaving too much space at the right) or otherwise little "imperfections" report them as well, i hate these kind of things which is why i try fixing them.

 

[NiranV Dean]

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.7.0 - "Improving Dragon"

 

[bubblesort]

I got Black Dragon the other day, and it has some really nice features on it. I wish I could export the animations from the poser to .bvh or .anim, but I know that's a feature he's working on.

I might use it for photography or in world machinima, but it won't be my main viewer, because it's very slow. I mean, I get frame rates in the 80s and 90s some times, but the texture and object loading takes forever. I read through the excellent FAQ on the web site, and tinkered with all the settings I could find, but I can't get my avatar and my little skybox to rez fully in less than 20 or 30 minutes, so I didn't even attempt going to a club with it yet. My avatar complexity is always under 100k, and here are my system specs. It might be a setting I'm missing, IDK. I'll ask about it on discord later.

The discord for Black Dragon is awesome, by the way.

 

[NiranV Dean]

I got Black Dragon the other day, and it has some really nice features on it. I wish I could export the animations from the poser to .bvh or .anim, but I know that's a feature he's working on.

I might use it for photography or in world machinima, but it won't be my main viewer, because it's very slow. I mean, I get frame rates in the 80s and 90s some times, but the texture and object loading takes forever. I read through the excellent FAQ on the web site, and tinkered with all the settings I could find, but I can't get my avatar and my little skybox to rez fully in less than 20 or 30 minutes, so I didn't even attempt going to a club with it yet. My avatar complexity is always under 100k, and here are my system specs. It might be a setting I'm missing, IDK. I'll ask about it on discord later.

The discord for Black Dragon is awesome, by the way.

Technically there is no setting that would throttle down the loading, sometimes loading is just awefully slow but you might be having a different issue that you just perceive as everything loading slow (like some things not loading at all thus everything taking so long).

Though i'd like to take a look at the place and see for myself what the cause might be.

Also keep in mind that the Viewer does not use Havok nor KDU, loading times are generally perceived to be slower but i've never noticed a big issue with loading times, even a 5gb texture memory place loaded in 1-2 minutes fully. What does take very long are avatars though, they take far longer than anything else and they kinda bog the loading process down.

 

[Maitimo]

I've been using Black Dragon a lot for taking pictures lately, and I really love it. It for sure out-performs Firestorm in terms of rendering quality without sacrificing much, if anything, in fps. The one thing that's keeping me from making it my full time viewer is the lack of a built in AO, cos I for sure ain't gonna mess around making a custom AO with notecards ever again.

 

[NiranV Dean]

Black Dragon 64 - Update 3.7.1 - 3.7.3 - "Improving Dragon"

I've been using Black Dragon a lot for taking pictures lately, and I really love it. It for sure out-performs Firestorm in terms of rendering quality without sacrificing much, if anything, in fps. The one thing that's keeping me from making it my full time viewer is the lack of a built in AO, cos I for sure ain't gonna mess around making a custom AO with notecards ever again.

You make it sound like messing around with notecards in AO's is hard, its just annoying, waiting for the contents list to load. Also, when i finally get around to improve my own server side AO and add lot more fanciness to it, you'll wish all AO's had this much comfort and ease of setting up a notecard, that is if what i'm planning actually works.

Besides, the in-Viewer AO still uses a script, just like any other AO and as i recently learned doesn't even use server-side capabilities, meaning its still slow as fuck and unreliable. Something i'm already doing far better with my server-side AO, i just need to make the notecard process more user friendly.

 

[Maitimo]

It's just that typing out the names of each individual animation takes much more effort than drag-and-drop from inventory into AO folder. I have only half the number of fingers to type with than everyone else has and this is a significant thing for me. And I don't just use a pre built AO because none of them are designed specifically for people missing a limb. Which means I have to select aninations carefully, so all my AOs are customised.

Anything that avoids the need to type in animation names is all I need.

 

[Clara D.]

It's just that typing out the names of each individual animation takes much more effort than drag-and-drop from inventory into AO folder. I have only half the number of fingers to type with than everyone else has and this is a significant thing for me. And I don't just use a pre built AO because none of them are designed specifically for people missing a limb. Which means I have to select aninations carefully, so all my AOs are customised.

Anything that avoids the need to type in animation names is all I need.

Right-click properties on the anim, then copy-paste the name.

 

[NiranV Dean]

It's just that typing out the names of each individual animation takes much more effort than drag-and-drop from inventory into AO folder. I have only half the number of fingers to type with than everyone else has and this is a significant thing for me. And I don't just use a pre built AO because none of them are designed specifically for people missing a limb. Which means I have to select aninations carefully, so all my AOs are customised.

Anything that avoids the need to type in animation names is all I need.

Right-click properties on the anim, then copy-paste the name.

Exactly this. I'm lazy, i'd never type in the crazy names animations have. Allthough i do it via right-click rename, ctrl + c (copy) and ctrl + v (paste)

 

[OrinB]

I used to keep all my vendor/server and AO notecards in excel spreadsheets. It's so easy to update something, paste an item in there from SL or add lines; then export to CSV format and open with a text editor to paste into a notecard in SL. It's longer to type out the process here than it is to just do!

 

[Clara D.]

Exactly this. I'm lazy, i'd never type in the crazy names animations have. Allthough i do it via right-click rename, ctrl + c (copy) and ctrl + v (paste)

I use properties only because of no-mod anims

 

[NiranV Dean]

I use properties only because of no-mod anims

Huh what? You can't rename no-mod anims? really? I never noticed....
Whats the point even...

 

[Maitimo]

Huh what? You can't rename no-mod anims? really? I never noticed....
Whats the point even...

You can't rename no-mod anything. That's why my inventory has so many damn unnecessary subfolders in it.

The only advantage I ever saw in this was when I used to sell my own artwork inworld. I didn't want people removing my name from the object description or linking it to their own prims to overcome the object-creator thing, and the only way to do that was to ensure it was no-mod, and I added resizer scripts to compensate. I hated doing it that way, which is partly why I quit (and also because I am too lazy to make new stuff with all that rigmarole involved).

 

[NiranV Dean]

Black Dragon 64 - Update 3.8.0 - "Enhancing Dragon"

 

[NiranV Dean]

Black Dragon 64 - Update 3.8.1 - "Enhancing Dragon"

 

[NiranV Dean]

Black Dragon 64 - Update 3.8.2 - "Enhancing Dragon"

 

[Lucierda Solari]

I tried to apply my own WindLight settings to myself and then Black Dragon crashed

This is the log:

Faulting application name: Black Dragon.exe, version: 6.4.1.46091, time stamp: 0x5eaa012d
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7601.24384, time stamp: 0x5c6e245d
Exception code: 0xc0000374
Fault offset: 0x00000000000bf302
Faulting process id: 0x13e0
Faulting application start time: 0x01d635f8c0c9b088
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Black Dragon\Black Dragon.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll
Report Id: ff879843-a1f6-11ea-abf0-e03f49b20ffb

I ran a SFC and it found nothing wrong.

 

[NiranV Dean]

I tried to apply my own WindLight settings to myself and then Black Dragon crashed

This is the log:

Faulting application name: Black Dragon.exe, version: 6.4.1.46091, time stamp: 0x5eaa012d
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7601.24384, time stamp: 0x5c6e245d
Exception code: 0xc0000374
Fault offset: 0x00000000000bf302
Faulting process id: 0x13e0
Faulting application start time: 0x01d635f8c0c9b088
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Black Dragon\Black Dragon.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll
Report Id: ff879843-a1f6-11ea-abf0-e03f49b20ffb

I ran a SFC and it found nothing wrong.

I'm aware of the issue, it apparently only happens for anyone not me and only while using the Edit Sky/Water editors, the Fixed Environment editor doesn't do this, which makes debugging this issue basically impossible. The next update is going to remove the Edit Sky/Water editors and reuse the Fixed Environment window instead, since they are all the same window anyway. This should hopefully fix this issue once and for all.

 

[Lucierda Solari]

I'm aware of the issue, it apparently only happens for anyone not me and only while using the Edit Sky/Water editors, the Fixed Environment editor doesn't do this, which makes debugging this issue basically impossible. The next update is going to remove the Edit Sky/Water editors and reuse the Fixed Environment window instead, since they are all the same window anyway. This should hopefully fix this issue once and for all.

Okay. At least it’s not my OS possibly becoming corrupted. X3

 

[NiranV Dean]

Black Dragon 64 - Update 3.8.4 - "Enhancing Dragon"