So you've been booting up Black Dragon and wondering about the different, where's your X and how can you find Y. This guide is going to focus on a few things about the UI you should probably know.
Toolbars
Starting with one of the first things you'll see after logging into Second Life will be your Toolbars. Toolbars are the 4 (2 vertical and 2 horizontal) bars aligned to the edge of your screen, these invisible bars can be filled with lots of buttons. By default you'll find a few of them already attached to the top.
From left to right you'll find the Voice toggle, Conversations, People, Places, the Machinima Sidebar, the Poser, Outfits and your Inventory. You can drag them to any of the four toolbars at the edge of your screen, top, bottom, left and right, you can also remove them or change their appearance as well as add new ones by right clicking them and selecting "Toolbar buttons". You can also get there by pressing Ctrl + Alt + B or by using the main menu (Dragon - Edit - Toolbars).
Local Chat
Local Chat is by default part of the Conversations window because as you might have guessed it it's a conversation (kinda... talking to yourself doesn't count). However not many know that you can simply detach the Local Chat tab from the Conversations window and have it be a separate window or more specifically a movable chatbar.
Balance
If you are wondering where your Linden Balance has gone, it can be found in your Inventory because... well it is part of your Inventory isn't it, that is if your Inventory is some kind of wallet.
Action Wheel (Pie Menu)
The good old pie menu is still a thing in Black Dragon, it can be found in Preferences - Interface - Use Action Wheel and in case you wonder why it's called Action Wheel, that's because it's really more of an action wheel than a pie menu now. It looks a lot different than what you're used to, the layout has been completely overhauled too and unified across all pie menus to offer as much consistency as possible, most options can be found in the same place across all pie menus, jellydoll options are always in the bottom menu, on the right for instance, bottom, top, left and right are the only places that can be menus except the detach menu of course. Menus are also visually highlighted with a blue border color and the entire pie menu has a fancy open animation, although you will hardly see it as it opens really fast, but here's it in super slow motion regardless.
Top Bar
The Topbar, besides additional graphics options this is probably the core of what started once Nirans Viewer. The Topbar is a unique combination of the Favoritesbar, the Statusbar and the Navigationbar all in one, neatly packed to save as much space and offer all functions still. It can also be customized somewhat, you can toggle of favorites if you want to save more space or simply don't use them, you can show coordinates and parcel properties too. The previous and next teleport as well as home button can be found here too. Did you know you can search via your Navigationbar? And did you know you can type in names of landmarks you got to auto-complete them and teleport there? You can also click into the Navigationbar and change the coordinates to teleport up/down or in any direction. Who needs the GetToHeight (GTH) command if the Navigationbar can do all of it already.
Main Menu
The main menu simply labeled as "Dragon" is another unique feature of the combined Topbar although it was more out of necessity than actual desire. It houses all menus you know and love, opens up all additional menus and makes the need to toggle the Advanced and Develop menus obsolete as these are shown by default. No more Ctrl + Alt + D (which was clashing with camera movement control anyway). A neat feature of those menus is that you can undock them by clicking the small double line at the top of a menu, this will undock the menu and make it a window you can keep open and drag around where ever you want it. Handy.
Animation "Synchronization"
Quite a few people keep asking if such a feature exists. Well does it? No, not directly. However you can find an animation "restart" in the Poser window which can be found in the main menu Dragon - My Useful Features - Pose/Animation Manipulator. Simply select everyone whose animations you want to restart and hit the "Restart" button, this is essentially the same as synchronizing them.
Machinima Sidebar
The Machinima Sidebar is a really neat and quick tool to change a few settings for that perfect shot, it has been with us in several incarnations now since almost 6 years and it's really easy to get to too! Just hit F1, you can also click the Machinima Sidebar button if you got that one in your toolbars or simply do it through the main menu Dragon - My Useful Features - Machinima Sidebar. It offers a good selection of all of the most used features (except windlight presets) for you to play with and soon you'll even be able to make your very own version of it!
Preferences
Oh the preferences, the heart of the Dragon. You'll find an extreme amount of extra options surfaced in Black Dragon, 90% of which are found in the "Display" tab, the very core of what makes this Viewer what it is. You'll find a lot of options for each and every aspect of the graphics in Black Dragon, almost everything is customizable to some degree if you know how.
Each and every option has been labeled properly with their correct name rather than some abbreviation that someone chose to dumb down the name, almost everything can be googled and read up on if you really want to know what it is. In addition i added tooltips for every single option explaining what the option does as best as i can without making it sound dumbed down again, they even show you visually how much of an impact the option has in general both on performance and visual fidelity. All options have also been reorganized and logically grouped to make the sheer amount of options remotely manageable, this is to make sure i'm not just adding more and more tabs making the whole preferences window a tabbing nightmare where you are just navigating deeper into the what seems like a folder structure down until you end up somewhere you don't want to be.
All options are organized from top to bottom, have a streamlined look and follow design rules to make sure everything looks as consistent as possible. Sliders are only used where it makes sense and most of the quality-type options have been simply replaced with radio button chains that offer a much simpler and easier "Low - Medium - High - Ultra" style of setting your quality as it can be found in games today, no more guessing whether 2 is better than 1 or the other way around. This also allowed for a neat little visual aid i added to highlight options that represent the equivalent of Linden Labs "Ultra" setting as well as highlight options that might cause issues or are not recommended to be set such as the feared Object Quality beyond 2. Ontop of all this, the title tabs will show small warning icons informing that something you've set might be problematic and you should possibly look into it, especially if you are having issues, you can hover your mouse over them to get more information on what is wrong. Have you set too much video memory to be used? or too less? Is your draw distance too high? It will tell you! Watch out for the signs!
If that wasn't enough there are also "Default" buttons for all slider-based options allowing you to quickly revert back to the recommended default settings. NEAT! Just another thing, you can actually click the title tabs to open and close them, WOW! Oh another, in case you are an avid mouse wheel scroller, don't worry i feel you, scrolling through these options often meant accidentally changing them when your mouse hovered over them, NO MORE, options will no longer be changed when using your scroll wheel, phew, keep scrolling! So many changes, so many improvements and so much work just for a window that displays some options you might never even look into again.
And all of this for just a tap on Ctrl + P, easy to remember if you think about Control Preferences. You can also open it from the main menu Dragon - Edit - Preferences, really easy to remember too if you think of it as a sentence. In Black [Dragon] i want to [Edit] my [Preferences].
