Black Dragon 64x - Update 4.3.0 "Exporting Dragon"

It's finally here.

The update we have all been waiting for! The Poser finally gets its EXPORTER!

You can get started making poses by opening the Poser, switching to "Creation Mode" at the top left and then start making your pose. Give it a name, set some parameters and hit "Export", the Viewer will flash a notification telling you the save location, you can now go to Dragon - Upload - Animation and navigate into the folder and choose the animation you exported, its that easy!

Of course this update contains a whole bunch of other changes, watch the video above to hear more about those!

Black Dragon 64x - Update 4.2.1 "Speeding Dragon"

 As promised the first update to bugfix this mess!

Right click should work again in Mouselook (you have to hold down Alt), the "Texture" tab in Tools should be fully functional again (Media and Alpha Masking Cutoff wasn't working), the minimap can be dragged around again, the new profile should no longer spew errors when trying to delete Picks or Classifieds, the world map "Copy SLURL" button should now be properly clickable, gestures should no longer default to "B" and the Second Life profile tab has been reverted to the previous style (other tabs are coming with upcoming updates).

Lastly, the Viewer now comes with a proper installer, this means there are also Start Menu shortcuts and an uninstaller, tell me if you find any issues with it! In the future i hope to add a bit more to it, its really basic right now but it should give Linden Labs the requested "easy" uninstall method and thus protect my Viewer from getting thrown out of the TPVD list.

As always thanks for your patience and support!

By Emeline Laks

Black Dragon 64x - Update 4.2.0 "Speeding Dragon"

 New year, new updates.

Starting with this first update that bings the Viewer up to date with the latest code. I'll be following this with bugfixes and more changes in the coming weeks.

This time i'm however not going to write much, since i've made an update video for it (for the few things worth mentioning)

I'd like to hear if this is something you like and would like to see more.

By Rosa Aurelia

By Emeline Laks

By IzabellaMae

Black Dragon 64x - Update 4.1.5 "Speeding Dragon"

First update starting to work down the "Suggestions" todo list, also as always a couple bugfixes and changes.

Tools - Content tab now has a neat little menu button that allows quick access to all script related options, reset, recompile, set running/stopped, that stuff. In the future i'll be bringing more building related options into the Tools window, also next up is copy/paste in Tools (YES, you heard that right, calm down its an official feature now... meaning i'll get it too)

As per suggestion "Since Logoff" filter in your Inventory - Recent tab is now disabled by default, making recent actually display something again and useful. Someone also suggested that the texture memory display is confusing because it shows the entire usage rather than what the Viewer uses, so now Preferences only shows the amount the Viewer itself uses (instead of the total), you can still see the total in the Task Manager and the texture console.

Pressing Enter (just Enter nothing else) should no longer toggle Borderless window... oof, also Show Look At and Show Point At are both enabled again (you better not use it to spy on others)... some tooltips have been improved and clarified because it was apparently confusing that it mentioned turning it off would disable something when the option label reads "Enable" ... and since there is still a very tiny amount of people still having issues with permanently turning when a controller is plugged in (despite the deadzone rework) i turned off avatar movement by default, this should hopefully get rid of even the last reports of this issue.

Since my list of things to do is getting smaller and smaller, the desire to merge the latest code becomes bigger and bigger but as long as RLVa hasn't updated i'm not going to merge (otherwise fixing RLVa is going to turn into a shitshow and will cause a lot of regressions and half-merges), so while waiting on that its more of working down the Suggestions and improving and fixing stuff. On a sidenote, the next couple maintenance releases from LL are going to include a large batch of Alchemy's memory leak and performance improvements, so look forward for that when its finally time to get the latest hopefully-not-freezing-on-right-click code (yea i know that joke is getting old).

By Emeline Laks

Black Dragon Guide: Movement Controls 2.0

 One of the most common questions is: "How do i change the controls to be like Firestorm" or "How do i turn around". If for some reason you are not using your mouse to look around you'll find that the controls in Black Dragon slightly differ from other Viewers.

The following controls have been changed to bring them in line with industry standards:

• A / D / Arrow Left / Arrow Right makes you strafe left and right respectively. This has been changed from Shift + A / D / Arrow Left / Arrow Right.
• Q and E make you turn left and right respectively. This has been changed from A / D / Arrow Left / Arrow Right.
• Space makes you jump. This has been changed from E.
• X makes you stop all motion. This has been changed from Space.

Practically speaking if you have been using mousesteering to look around (dragging your avatar or nametag) only Jump and Stop Movement have been changed since all Viewers will use strafing while mousesteering. Most people however use the onscreen controls or keyboard only and thus notice this change a lot more.

Black Dragon offers the option to change all controls however you like. You can do so by opening Preferences and navigating to the Keybindings tab in which you will find all controls currently set up for each control mode. It looks like this:

In there, you simply double click any of the keybinds you want to change, that is for this example you will want to change the entries for "Turn Left" and "Turn Right", alternatively you can select them and click the "Modify" button at the bottom. This will open a new window that looks like this:

As per the instruction, simply press the desired key you want to change the action to be bound to, that is in this case press A for "Turn Left" and D for "Turn Right" respectively, when done you it will show you that the action will be bound to your pressed key like in the picture above, simply hit "Bind" and repeat this for the other action. After changing both "Turn Left" and "Turn Right" you will have to remove (or change) the entries for "Move Left" and "Move Right" as these are still bound to A and D. Simply select them and click "Delete" at the bottom. If you use the Arrow Left and Arrow Right keys you can simply change "Turn Left" and "Turn Right" to these, or add an entirely new set of two actions for them (this will effectively restore the original control scheme). Adding new actions is pretty simple, you click "Add" at the bottom opening a new window similar to the change binding window above. It looks like this:

Here you simply select the desired action, in this example "Turn Left" and press Arrow Left (or A) and hit "Bind" at the bottom. Repeat this process for "Turn Right" and you are good to go.

All of the above can be repeated for any controls, the Viewer offers all available movement options to be changed. Make sure that when changing or adding controls you select the correct mode at the bottom left. Changing or adding keybinds to "Third Person" is not going to affect controls in First Person (aka Mouselook) or while sitting for instance.

Following the above instructions should change this:

Into this:

Black Dragon 64x - Update 4.1.4 "Speeding Dragon"

Another bugfix update, this time quite important actually.

There has been a particularly nasty crash issue with RLVa since the performance update, it should be resolved now, from my testing using RLVa seems to work fine now, still no guarantee that RLVa itself works of course. When Kitty gets around to update her RLVa repo to the latest LL code i'll be doing a massive RLVa sweep to get it updated and fixed again.

Other than this highly important crash fix there have been a few fixes for lesser problems. Shadows shouldn't be appearing anymore when camming close to something (this will only apply if you did not touch the RenderShadowBias and RenderShadowBiasError debugs. If you did, reset them to their defaults).

The missing VSync option has also been added to preferences, some wrong tooltips for the FPS limiter have been changed, Alt + Enter will now toggle borderless (like you'd expect from default windows behavior) and the Outfit menu entry will now toggle the Outfit window instead of opening it only.

With this most of the reported bugs have been fixed and my buglist has shrunken significantly, allowing me to focus on suggestions/planned features now and soon merging up to the latest code (when the maintenance release gets around and fixes the particularly nasty edit bug that is currently in the latest LL release) hopefully fixing a couple other reported issues that also happen in the official Viewer, i suppose after that its back to taking inventory, fixing reported bugs, maintenance and finally some sweep through the entire UI, reworking some UI parts that are in dire need for some touchups (Places)

As always, keep reporting the bugs!

By IzabellaMae

By Emeline Laks

Black Dragon 64x - Update 4.1.3 "Speeding Dragon"

 This is a bugfix update, quick get it!

It adresses mainly the reported issues and a couple issues that were already known bug weren't fixed in the last update.

The biggest problem with the last release was the rework on the keybinding process allowing mouse clicks to be bound, this however also created some issues where clicking into the action dropdown would be counted as click towards binding the mouse click, no problem, just press the button... welp the next issue is that it didn't clear the mouse input when pressing a key and vice versa. Once bound it was kept so there was no way to get rid of the mouse bind other than starting over or modifying the binding after creating it. Both issues should be resolved now.

Staying on the topic of controls, the joystick controls were inverted, this should now be fixed too.

Further i added options to control the speed at which you pitch and yaw, this is MAINLY intended to be used for keyboard and onscreen controls, be careful it impacts mouse too.

The poser has also gotten another upgrade, apart from a couple bugfixes with bones not properly resetting it can now "recapture" the current bone positions and rotations for all bones that are currently disabled. This was suggested because a lot of people tend to disable the facial bones, use HUDs to set a facial expression and then would like to continue finetuning these without having to stop posing. This is now possible with the new Recapture button next to Mirror, simply disable all bones (double click or use the button) you want to recapture, then hit "Recapture" and you should be done.

Another often suggested change was adding next/previous arrows to the environment preset selections. Of course i absolutely declined those because it is a Firestorm feature, now that i implemented these new "Tickers" how i call them which just so happen to have arrows i swapped the dropdowns for the preset selection to these new ticker dropdowns, meaning you can now CLICK next and previous and don't need to hold Shift and press Up/Down (yes that's a thing). You can thank me later.

Finally, the right-click selection performance took a massive hit thanks to reverting it to LL code. Needless to say that's fixed, selection performance is once again a million times better and will not immediately drop you into less than single digit framerates when you select a human mesh body. In coming updates i will bring back the old selection outlines again, the new ones stink, the only upside of them is that i get the nice outline without the dots, but we pay with a metric fuckton of other issues, ugh.

By Emeline Laks

Black Dragon 64x - Update 4.1.2 "Speeding Dragon"

This update was brought to you buy self-destructing Windows.

No seriously if someone tells you Windows 10 is indestructible, laugh at them. All it takes is... idk a kernel level anti cheat like ...mh Easy Anti Cheat?

Yea so that happened. VRChat pulled an oofers woofers and added Easy Anti Cheat with false lies to cut down on hacking, griefing, ripping/copybotting, crashing and so on. In the process they managed to implement the worst anti cheat into a SOCIAL PLATFORM in the worst possible way. Blueescreens, far as my eyes could see, bluescreens here, bluescreens there, bluescreens everywhere, Easy Anti Cheat doesn't like you not having that very latest security update that installs even more spyware from Microdumb onto your PC so what does it do? Bluescreens! Because its a fucking kernel-level anti cheat. That shit has more power than YOU as administrator. Oh yea those bluescreens? They corrupted my windows so hard it started a wonderful chain of fuckups, first windows didn't install the next update not correctly, so it would undo it but would fuck up doing so, leaving a half broken update, this in turn started cascading into other stuff, breaking all kinds of things, Unity wouldn't start up anymore for instance, Second Life complained about the inability to fill in username EVERY TIME and quite some other stupid stuff until Windows finally exploded and refused to start up, it corrupted so hard, not even safe mode worked anymore. I had to set up Windows from scratch... lovely... so i spent a good week assessing the damage, recollecting everything, reinstalling and setting the build environment back up... and i'm still not done... i just managed to fumble everything together enough to get you the much needed update to get some pressing issues out of the way. What... a... mess.... here i made this to express how i feel.

Anyway!

As mentioned above 4.1.2 brings some much needed fixes for some pressing issues, namely the inability to use scripted triggers in mouselook. Note however since this function is now a keybind you will have to bind it manually OR reset your keybindings, it will NOT work without. Don't report this issue if you haven't done so.

On the upside, you can now bind left click and right click, just not both at the same time, this might actually require a lot of extra work, i will look into that later down the line.

Speaking of binding stuff... the flycam configuration window has been revamped and you will find that binding buttons and axis is now easier than ever with the visual aid of some fancy dropdowns and icons! No more guessing what numbers mean!

Staying with flycam i revamped deadzones too, fixing them and making them work as you'd expect them. Instead of whatever fucky wucky bullshit they did before (scaling down the strength) they will now set a threshold below which all input is ignored, any input above the threshold is then rescaled to fit between the threshold and the maximum value so the "rest" of the available input allows for the entire input range. I also took the time to change the default deadzones and scales to accomodate for this change. For first time users this should vastly reduce the cases where your plugged in controller will make you turn endlessly. For the few cases the deadzones are not high enough, you can now simply turn them up a bit if your controller has extreme stickdrift. These changes also bring destructive changes to space navigators (please do not use them, they are trash and were just a stupid PR stunt), i'd be surprised if they worked at all still. (Seriously, get a controller, Xbox360/XboxOne they really aren't expensive, 30$ and they are super good, they come in handy for games too).

Other than that there's some misc bugfixes here and there.

As always, keep reporting bugs and another big thank you to all Patrons new and old!

By Emelie Laks

By IzabellaMae

Black Dragon 64x - Update 4.1.1 "Speeding Dragon"

Just a small update to fix the biggest woes of the last update.

 A couple highights include: Mouselook guns/triggers working again, snapshot preview double click will not crash and break the Viewer anymore, fullbrights are once again subject to fog again, camera modes button works again, Poser no longer breaking when leaving Mouselook and some UI fixes and tooltip improvements.

For mouselook guns to work again you might have to reset your keybindings although it has been reported to work without.

As always keep the bugreports coming.

Black Dragon 64x - Update 4.1.0 "Speeding Dragon"

Two long months of wading through a lot of stuff. Now it is finally here, the update you have all been waiting for!

I'll just say this, this update brings the Viewer up to date with 6.6.0 AKA the Performance Viewer, yes you heard that right! 

PERFORMANCE VIEWER. YOU GET PERFORMANCE, YOU GET PERFORMANCE AND YOU GET PERFORMANCE; EVERYONE GETS PERFORMANCE!

Ohwow 10% performance increase! Haha! NO! We are speaking of up to 100% more FPS and MORE! I went from barely 20 FPS @ 5 avatar max (everyone else jellydolled or impostored) to 40+ FPS with a full 20 person (not jellydolled or impostored) hangout. Not counting the fact that all avatars are now rendered, that is a minimum 100% FPS increase, not to mention that its 4 times as many fully rendered avatars!

Bad news is, this update touched practically everything in the Viewer. Expect bugs, expect potential crashes, export features not working (Motion Blur is currently broken). I fixed almost all reported issues and made sure the Viewer is in a usable state to get this wonderful update into your hands ASAP. If you have any difficulties seeing objects, try turning off Object Object Occlusion in Display preferences (in addition to the normal things that you have to do when this object vanish bug appears, get it?).

I HIGHLY recommend clearing your cache for this one!

Other noteworthy things are the inclusion of 360 snapshots and 2FA, all older updates will break when 2FA is going to be mandatory, so this is the minimum update you will have to be on.

As always check out the Discord and report any bugs you find!

By Emeline Laks

By Rosa Aurelia

By IzabellaMae

By Spectris Audax

By Sashi Summers