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