Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.6.8 "Manipulating Dragon"

So im going to push this as an "emergency" update. Consider this update absolutely mandatory if you downloaded 3.6.7.


3.6.7 had a big issue, a very few select people couldn't login anymore, something that appeared with 3.6.6 and i attempted to fix this, said fix however made it worse for some others. Here's the full story as posted on discord.

This kept me awake for the most part of this night, i suppose i can consider this a nightmare now.

3.6.8 changes the maximum character limit back down to 16 letters, this also means that everyone with a password "longer" than 16 characters should probably rethink their password to be exactly 16 characters long as any longer wont be accepted anyway. You can also just leave it as is but note that only the first 16 characters of your password are important, the rest is never used. Good job Linden Labs never telling us and superb job at not having the server handling a truncation automatically server side. Good thing Inspector Niran was on this case!

Apart from this really strange issue, there have been some changes (not all of them that i originally planned to add but most of it) regarding the UI, specifically the 'Display' tab in preferences. In an attempt to make the warnings a bit clearer the Viewer will now highlight potentially bad settings in red, in addition to showing the warnings which have now been moved down into the panels themselves. Originally i planned to add a generic warning counter to the tabs but since this is an emergency update i'll want to push as soon as possible, i didnt get around to do that yet. How this looks like can be seen below (note that the 'Quality Options' tab havent had its warnings moved down at that time)

The quickfloaters (draw distance, preset, media and sound) have had their background changed to a hopefully better one and a bunch of settings have been turned off by default that really shouldnt be on anyway. Pitch Invert for controllers are disabled by default now, automatic fly when holding jump is disabled now (this was causing controllers to insta-fly when pressing jump) and the selection range limitation has been disabled by default as well.

Also fixed should be missing clouds, long ago i changed the texture names to reflect the proper names for the type of cloud, i forgot to update the default cloud noise setting to reflect this new name, this caused all new users to default to a non existent cloud noise image which prevented clouds from appearing until you changed the cloud noise image manually, also the cloud noise image dropdown should now display the currently selected image properly and will no longer accept text entry (since the list is refreshed on reopen anyway).

Lastly i've had the time to try out Bakes-on-Mesh in my Viewer and make sure everything is working, as far as i can tell it does, i've also used the chance to change the bake tab in the texture picker to be a list (suggested by Liru Fears, thanks for that) which surfaced new issues with lists not properly creating their childs which was fixed (thanks to Liru again) as well.

The rest is minor fixes like the last 2 lines in mini-profiles not interactable, UI layout inconistencies and cleanup.


As always if you experience issues, report them to me, i will try by best to fix whatever issues you are experiencing. No report = No help.

By Beev Fallen

By Mal

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.6.7 "Manipulating Dragon"

Here comes another update!



The main focus in this update is the Object Manipulator overhaul, more buttons, more features, new layout, better sorting, easier access, bugfixes and so on. I would consider this version the "Final" version for now.

The Object Manipulator was something i wanted to add to give the whole manipulation features a home and an easier and faster method of permorning these manipulations on a large scale. Alphas and light sources are now seperately listed into 2 additional lists in their respective tabs, this should reduce the amount of searching drastically, in addition root prims are now written in bold (rather than attached prims) and root and linkset prims are now grouped together, this should make finding and identifiying a whole object consisting of multiple parts much easier.

Each tab only displays the button that are really important for said tab topic and the main Objects tab is now an "All Objects" list that simply acts as a list for misc features like derendering items.

Note still none of the lists will display your own items or those attached to you to prevent you from accidentally changing your own stuff and actually saving these changes.

Apart from the Object Manipulator getting its full implementation, there are a couple of fixes, binding keys should now work as expected again (the action list didn't show the actions for the currently selected mode so it was impossible to bind third person actions for instance), passwords longer than 15 characters should now be enterable, the about window should now show the actual set memory values (even with automatic memory management enabled) and trying to get the UUID from a linkset prim should no longer crash the Viewer.

Also a couple new patrons joined my Patreon. Thank You!

This update also merges all the latest LL Release code, lots of crash fixes mainly.

By Beev Fallen

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.6.6 "Baking Dragon"

Finally an update, was about time.


Last month was a very hectic and special month.

My computer started falling apart as you'd expect after almost 10 years... first my power supply died, which took my GPU with it (again RIP GTX 670) then my backup harddrive failed completely and took basically everything with it and before my last HDD dies as well i thought i should probably do something. Sadly i don't have the money to do anything (infact, i'm on the verge of not being able to pay even my internet anymore >.< with Coffee Lychrono dropping his patron and a few others following in on the absolute low end right now). Luckily for me a couple friends i've been playing the past 2 months extensively (which is why the updates were so slow and delayed) agreed to help me out on this, together they bought me much needed new parts.

They visited me end of last month to build the PC together with me. A Ryzen 5 3600, 64gb of DDR4 3000 RAM and (finally) a new mainboard with 5.1 sorround sound again i can absolutely rock everything that's coming at me for the next 5 years minimum. I've also got two SSD's (small 250gb ones) and reinstalled Windows (and down upgrapded it to Windows 10, sadly). With 10 basically throwing stepping stones into my way, sabotaging my every move, pissing me off more than i could have ever imagined and 10 behaving like a pile of shit, taking away my rights even for my own folders, wanting me to confirm confirmations of confirming confirmation confirmations and still not allowing me to do what was considered a breeze in 7... and 10 absolutely INSISTING on reactivating every single background app, stupid backdoor, disabled telemetry collection and basically undoing what i've been doing the past couple weeks trying to get 10 to... behave... it hasn't exactly been easy to stay focused on ... well doing anything. So far i've reinstalled and configured most of the things again to allow creating updates again, so today marks the first update since the upgrade. I sure hope everything is in the right place and doesn't blow up immediately.

But holy cow i can tell you i am NOT disappointed at all. This Ryzen fares exactly like i expected, twice as much FPS across the board (some places even far more). Hah i can basically turn off jellydolls and still run around with 30 FPS in Ark Club (though really that's the absolute maximum and i haven't managed to get more there... the place seems completely outdated and simply runs like crap sadly even without people around)

Anyway, enough of the story of my life, back to the Viewer. This update brings the Viewer back on track, all the latest changes from LL are included plus a few more bugfixes of reported issues and some tweaks as well as a new playtoy.

This new playtoy listens to the name of "Object Manipulator" (such imagination, much wow) and is basically an extended version (or is going to be) of the "Prim Manipulation" menu that was previously found in the My Useful Features - Shortcuts sub menu. Right now it allows you to see a list of all (and i mean ALL) objects the Viewer knows about currently, minus your own attachments (and objects in world, hopefully). You can double click items to highlight/select them and you can "manipulate" them just like you could previously do with the menu, you can force change their alpha mode between blending, emissive and masking and you can see whether an object is a light and casts a projector shadow, you can also manipulate these as well and turn their shadow casting off, this should make finding and eliminating shadow projectors much faster and easier and allow you to select the projectors you really want to cast shadows easier than ever, all in the name of machinima. Great.

What it means to change the alpha mode can be seen in this example:

From blending to masking:

This allows temporarily fixing the fuckups of creators without needing permissions. What this essentially means is i can turn... this mess:

into something absolutely beautiful with some masking and some setting tweaks:

Looks like someone applied reshade but i promise you this is a raw image. I don't do the editing.

Further the viewer version is now shown in both login and "About Black Dragon", both the actual code version and the version i use for my updates, no need to start a second instance of BD anymore. I hope this reduces confusion a bit. Checking for update now also brings you here and the "Release Notes" link should now properly link to the changelog page.

Apart from that i fixed the price spinner for objects on sale, you should be able to set a price again and the annoying "Hippos!" badge has had its shortcut removed because apparently people have been accidentally triggering it since its so close to the teleport home shortcut (who the fuck does this?).

I've still got a huge bunch of things planned but only time will tell when and how they get done... if they get done at all.

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