How To Fix: the Viewer and its common problems.

I'm bored so today i'll be going over a bunch of startup problems quite a few people seem to have when first using the Viewer.

HELP: X or Y is white and stuff looks broken.

The Problem:

In the course of Black Dragon's development i made a really significant change to the minimum graphic settings of Black Dragon. You see, all other Viewers offer all options from legacy rendering, to 'Basic Shaders' (Vertex Shaders or commonly known as Windlight), Post Process Glow and finally 'Advanced Lighting Model' (previously Lighting and Shadows, correct would be Deferred Rendering), allowing a wide range of PC's starting from the minimum requirements to the uber gaming PC to utilize the Viewer and set whatever graphics people want. In my Viewer however, there are no options prior to Deferred Rendering anymore. That essentially means the minimum graphics level you get is Deferred Rendering (if you don't count the ability to disable it for personal crash prevention and fail safe reasons). If your hardware does not support Deferred Rendering (Intel Graphics Cards usually) or any of its needed components (such as the now included Vertex Shaders and Post Process Glow) or is incompatible to the changes i did to the shaders (AMD Graphics Cards sometimes have this issue) it will simply bail out and fail to enable Deferred Rendering, essentially locking you out of seeing everything normal. Sometimes the Viewer will simply disable Deferred Rendering because your stock settings were in the range between no Deferred Rendering and Deferred Rendering enabled. In all cases you will see the world broken, some prims or meshes missing, some body parts will be white, meshes especially.

In Short:

Looks like this:

whereas it should look like this ^

The problem happens when:

• using Intel Graphic Cards.
• using AMD Graphic Cards.
• randomly depending on your initial starting settings.

The Fix:

• If you are using a laptop you are almost guaranteed to use an Intel Graphics Cards, but most today's laptops have a dedicated NVidia Graphics Cards, if you know it does you will have to go into your Windows Start Menu - System Control Panel - NVidia System Control Panel - 3D Settings - Manage 3D Settings - Global Settings and set the preferred graphics processor to 'High Performance NVidia Graphics Processor'. After you've done that you'll have to restart the Viewer and go to Preferences - Display and toggle Deferred Rendering there. Your problem should be fixed.
• If you are using a desktop PC with an Intel Graphics Cards you are out of luck, this Viewer does not support Intel Graphics Cards. Go and use a different Viewer.
• If you are using an AMD Graphics Cards, try enabling Deferred Rendering first, if that doesn't work please report your problem to me directly so i can work on a fix.
• If you are using a NVidia Graphics Cards, try enabling Deferred Rendering first, if that for some reason doesn't work please report your problem to me directly too. 

HELP: My camera doesn't stay behind my avatar.

The Problem:

First off a clarification, your camera never stays behind your avatar, it doesn't in my Viewer and it doesn't in any other Viewer. Your problem is a different one, you just don't know how to properly explain it because you don't know what is happening. Your avatar is strafing left or right instead of what you are used by default from other Viewers, rotating left or right. Although strafing seems to be the wrong wording here, that is what it's actually called, your Avatar moves directly to your left or right relative to the current camera direction. It's yet another change that goes all the way back to Nirans Viewer, one that should have been in Second Life from the very beginning but Second Life is not the only 'game' doing it wrong, most games use strafing, some (presumably created by people like you who were getting used to something different) games use rotate by default, big mistake, you got an input device that we commonly know as 'Mouse' and this 'Mouse' fulfills the role of being a second, separate input device to split up and spread different tasks, such as moving and looking around to all your available resources or what you commonly refer to as your 'Hands'. One hand moves you around, including crouching, jumping, running or flying while the other enables you to look around completely independent of your movement. Over are the times in which you moved with arrow keys and looked up/down/left/right with your numpad in a really jerky and unprecise way.

In Short:

I changed the actions rotate left and right to strafe left and right and you are not used to it, as was i when i first changed it and was used to rotating for years (in Second Life).

The Fix:

• You can change the keybindings back to what you are used to by going into Preferences - Keybindings and clicking the trash icon left of the 'strafe left' and 'strafe right' action keybinds (which will display A and D and Left and Right a bit further to the right, then clicking the keybind buttons for the actions 'rotate left' and 'rotate right' (they will display Q and E) and pressing whatever button (presumably Arrow Left or Arrow Right) you want them to be, hit 'Bind' when you are done. Really easy and simple.
• You can also just deal with it and get used to it. Seriously, if you used the mouse to look around (drag your avatar) you won't notice this change most of the time anyway because by default 'rotate left' and 'rotate right' changes to 'strafe left' and 'strafe right' while dragging your avatar.