What are some of your pet peeves?

[NiranV Dean]

1 hour ago, Alyona Su said:

Ditto this. And BD does not take great pictures... it just makes it easier for the amateurs (EDIT to clarify - not amateurs in terms of picture-taking, but rather with regard to knowledge of viewer controls and the power of the mighty keyboard-commands LOL.) I can take just as great 100% in-world pictures with the LL Viewer. As for how good (or not) a picture is: That's the "photographic eyes" of the person composing the shot, not the viewer at all. And I agree with the tilted aspects - way, way over-used. It should only be used for effect. An effect is an effect because it's unusual or helps to tell the story. Too much of anything begets desensitizing to it and it turn into "meh."

@janetosilio I disagree; BD is more like Instagram, a-la filters. Just like anyone can pull the trigger of a gun, anyone can click a few buttons to create "FX".

I'd love to see a "photo contest" that is limited 100% to the LL Viewer and the picture must include full Viewer UI in it. That would be fun to see. LOL

Then you should know that BD has indeed features that you cannot achieve with the LL Viewer.

I agree that anyone can take nice pictures with any Viewer, it's not the Viewer doing these shots, its the user after all. But you make it sound like you can make shots that look similar to what BD offers and i highly disagree, it's a simple fact that you cannot. BD offers unique features (i'm not talking about instagram like filters like greyscale and posterize), BD has a fully fledged highly accurate all-bone poser which would otherwise take you possibly hours to get a pose even remotely where you want it, in BD you can simply and easily "perfect" it and BD also offers better SSAO, Shadows, Depth of Field as well as its own unique graphic features like Screen Space Reflections and Volumetric Lighting which both can drastically alter the look of a picture. None of these are available in any other Viewer and none of their effects can be replicated.

Here's an example of how those effects and the poser can be used in a scene:

[Eva Knoller]

I only use Black Dragon when I have A LOT of time to devote to pic taking. I am laughing at the sentiment that it’s a viewer for amateurs. It’s the viewer with the steepest learning curve, IMO, but it does things the other viewers can’t do. It is way more complicated to take a photo in BD than just clicking a button, and anyone who says so can’t convince me that they’ve ever even used it.

[NiranV Dean]

21 minutes ago, Eva Knoller said:

I only use Black Dragon when I have A LOT of time to devote to pic taking. I am laughing at the sentiment that it’s a viewer for amateurs. It’s the viewer with the steepest learning curve, IMO, but it does things the other viewers can’t do. It is way more complicated to take a photo in BD than just clicking a button, and anyone who says so can’t convince me that they’ve ever even used it.

I think what Alyona wanted to say here is that the general procedure taking a picture is the same across all Viewers, knowing the way around LL means you know the way around all Viewers. BD only appears to have a steeper learning curve on the surface because it surfaces (what a joke) more of the photography relevant options to the user. Almost all of the finetuning options for features like Depth of Field, SSAO and so on can be found in all Viewers, BD only adds new ones to these rarely and most of those were already present to some degree (such as shadow resolution, which is present in all Viewers but has seen decoupling from resolution and has more sliders to truly finetune it down to every single shadow map). While some effects are altered, they still work almost identical to how you'd expect them to work from other Viewers, the same options do the same change, it will just look slightly different. This 'slightly' different however is what makes the huge difference. BD lives from smaller details, slighter better shadows, slighter better depth of field, finer colors, smoother SSAO, subtle reflections on specular surfaces all these things are small if seen in an isolated case but alltogether they can make pictures truly shine in a way no other Viewer can. Those tiny things should be your main focus because (like Alyona implied) the baseline shot can be done in any Viewer.

Quote

My only knowledge of BD comes from the behavior I've seen from the person that made it, and the behavior is atrocious. No way in hell I would every patronize that POS. 

Pet peeve #1: People like this.

I know i'm running into an open knife pointed at me here but what can i do, you basically summoned me. Your behavior right there is the very reason i behave so "atrocious". Maybe you should start looking at this from a different angle. Did i attack or insult you at any point? If so, ask yourself why, maybe you showed exactly this behavior before. If not, then ask yourself what the problem is, based on what you said you don't seem like someone who'd spend even 10 seconds wasting on a thought experiment why Niran might act this way. Take this very conversation as example. I'm here solely because you said this. I can guarantee you that if you started a conversation with me like that i'd definitely act exactly as you'd expect, absolutely atrocious. If you came to me at some point silently, inworld or discord asking me for help without ever mentioning that you said something like this (or that you are person X who said something like this somewhere), there would be no reason for me to be anything but nice and helpful towards you, unless of course you give me reason (someone actually did once).

Edited December 24, 2019 by NiranV Dean

[Alyona Su]

3 hours ago, Alyona Su said:

He's okay, though I think he forgets that his knowledge and general efforts to be information tends to feel condescending sometimes. I get it. Though there are those *other* people who outright express their "greater-than-thou-ness*. All. The. Time.

 

 

2 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

Then you should know that BD has indeed features that you cannot achieve with the LL Viewer.

You make my case, sir. (By the way: TMI for me because I really don't care LOL)

As for all that fancy stuff, Professionals do it in post, so the original remains a pristine "negative" (a.k.a.: Backup of an original).

Edited December 24, 2019 by Alyona Su

[NiranV Dean]

Just now, Alyona Su said:

 

You make my case, sir. (By the way: TMI for me because I really don't care LOL)

As for all that fancy stuff, Professionals do it in post, so the original remains a pristine "negative" (a.k.a.: Backup of an original).

That's the whole point. You DON'T do it in post. It looks bad. Also, doing it in post is only applicable for recorded footage, be it videos or pictures, you can't just do these in "post" unless you use third party injectors like Reshade and those will look bad too because Reshade doesn't have access to SL's depth buffer which it absolutely needs to do more than just some color correcting and fakish bloom.

The whole point of the Viewer is that you have these things for real, in realtime, inside Second Life, not just as imaginary post processed fake show-off picture. You don't take Minecraft and photoshop volumetric lighting and clouds and shadows and all that in and say "WOW look, Minecraft looks so awesome" you go out download a shaderpack and use that to get these things for REAL in Minecraft and make it look actually nice.

The reason some people (including me btw) are so snobby about their pictures is because they aren't photoshopped (if they are then they shall be excluded), i can take any of my pictures, the fanciest there is and say "This is how Second Life looks like", what can you? Show me a picture of your avatar that is photoshopped up and down, left and right and is basically a painted mona-lisa? Great but that's not how Second Life looks, thats just your imagination how you'd like it to look like. I don't see photoshopped snapshots as snapshots anymore, to me a snapshot, as fancy as it might be, is worthless if it was edited in post, its nothing more than worthless eyecandy that big companies have been shoving down our throats in media over the past 20 years, faked screenshots of a product that never existed, its simply a lie. Unlike some other people i hate being lied to and thats why i fight so much against photoshopped pictures, i want to end photoshopped pictures, i want to end the time we paint our never-to-be-realized imaginations into pictures and start a time where these can actually become a reality even if just with small steps, one at a time.

Which brings me to pet peeve #2: Seeing ugly photoshopped pictures on the main page of Second Life when i could give them better pictures 90% of the time by just closing my eyes and randomly picking from any of my user's posted pictures. I've seen some absolutely beautiful and incredible pictures and instead we are presented with this... utter random photoshopped trash that looks like someone walked past a random location hit snapshot at a random point in time and called it a day, then touched it up some in photoshop and said "this is fine". It's absolutely demoralizing to see that photoshopped pictures are still so readily picked over much better unedited pictures, just as much as you saying "just add it in post". You are spitting into my face. According to you everything i've been fighting for the past 8 years has been a waste of time "when you can just add it in post". Thanks for nothing i guess.

[Janet Voxel]

Just coming up in here Dunkin’ on mofos...

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

Another one is a club/DJ advertising a 70s dance night and go there and they're playing house music and only doing the 70s song twice an hour. When questioning the DJ, the owner decides to eject you.  This happened long ago.

[Lyssa Greymoon]

7 hours ago, janetosilio said:

Its a good viewer, it’s just super technical which puts it out of reach for the average SL user. Not my daily driver, but it does unlock a lot of potential in SL.

I'd like to get the hang of using it, because there are obviously some very good tools in there. Every time I try it's like the viewer is trying to stop me. About three seconds in I realize the movement and view keymappings are all different. Even when they're remapped, they don't act the same. All the preference menus are completely different so it's harder to find anything than when Miss Sakamoto tidies up. After I get somewhere, a bunch of avatars that have no business being rendered as jellydolls are getting jellydolled and the avatar complexity slider doesn't seem to be doing anything. Is there another setting I need to set to fix this? Where is it? What the hell am I doing? I think I'm too stupid to use it.

[Seicher Rae]

6 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

That's the whole point. You DON'T do it in post. It looks bad. 

Rather surprisingly, most of this comment is going to agree with Niran, but not this part. Post-production doesn't necessarily look bad. It can look great or it can look horrible. It can look like "real" SL or be so far removed from SL that the resulting image really couldn't or shouldn't be labeled as a SL image. I don't Photoshop, for a variety of reasons. I like the challenge of taking good screenshots (Firestorm viewer). I come from a background where you really should learn the fundamentals first, before you go mucking around with things--in other words, learn whatever viewer, learn the fundamentals of photography, learn the fundamentals of composition and color, etc. then do post-production if that's your end goal. I can guarantee you'll have a lot less post-production work to do if your original photos are really good screenshots.

 

6 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

The whole point of the Viewer is that you have these things for real, in realtime, inside Second Life, not just as imaginary post processed fake show-off picture. You don't take Minecraft and photoshop volumetric lighting and clouds and shadows and all that in and say "WOW look, Minecraft looks so awesome" you go out download a shaderpack and use that to get these things for REAL in Minecraft and make it look actually nice.

The reason some people (including me btw) are so snobby about their pictures is because they aren't photoshopped (if they are then they shall be excluded), i can take any of my pictures, the fanciest there is and say "This is how Second Life looks like", what can you? Show me a picture of your avatar that is photoshopped up and down, left and right and is basically a painted mona-lisa? Great but that's not how Second Life looks, thats just your imagination how you'd like it to look like. I don't see photoshopped snapshots as snapshots anymore, to me a snapshot, as fancy as it might be, is worthless if it was edited in post, its nothing more than worthless eyecandy that big companies have been shoving down our throats in media over the past 20 years, faked screenshots of a product that never existed, its simply a lie. Unlike some other people i hate being lied to and thats why i fight so much against photoshopped pictures, i want to end photoshopped pictures, i want to end the time we paint our never-to-be-realized imaginations into pictures and start a time where these can actually become a reality even if just with small steps, one at a time.

The BD snobbery I was referring to covers both the raw screenshots and the PShopped ones, with the vast majority of people still doing post-production on their original BD images.

I can be snobby about raw screenshots, too, and I use Firestorm. The reason is what I stated above: It is a skill, that a lot of people lack (for a variety of reasons, including laziness). Excellent use of PhotoShop is also a skill, so I'm not going to put that down as something that is "less than." But it is something different.

6 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

Which brings me to pet peeve #2: Seeing ugly photoshopped pictures on the main page of Second Life when i could give them better pictures 90% of the time by just closing my eyes and randomly picking from any of my user's posted pictures. I've seen some absolutely beautiful and incredible pictures and instead we are presented with this... utter random photoshopped trash that looks like someone walked past a random location hit snapshot at a random point in time and called it a day, then touched it up some in photoshop and said "this is fine". It's absolutely demoralizing to see that photoshopped pictures are still so readily picked over much better unedited pictures, just as much as you saying "just add it in post". You are spitting into my face. According to you everything i've been fighting for the past 8 years has been a waste of time "when you can just add it in post". Thanks for nothing i guess.

I'm not as anti-Photoshopped photos as Niran, but I get his point. I do not think PShopped pictures should be used as official SL photos, for the very reason he states—that it is misleading. What people do in Flickr is another story.

Once SL photos get altered by more than just cropping or a little bit of glitch fixing then I think they should be termed digital art, or SL-based digital art, or something not SL photos. That'll never happen, but if I ruled the world it would.

At one point I entered photo contests. I no longer do because most do not have a separate category for raw screenshots. Comparing raw screenshots up against SL-based digital art is comparing the proverbial apples to oranges, and in this case oranges usually win.

 

[NiranV Dean]

10 hours ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

I'd like to get the hang of using it, because there are obviously some very good tools in there. Every time I try it's like the viewer is trying to stop me. About three seconds in I realize the movement and view keymappings are all different. Even when they're remapped, they don't act the same. All the preference menus are completely different so it's harder to find anything than when Miss Sakamoto tidies up. After I get somewhere, a bunch of avatars that have no business being rendered as jellydolls are getting jellydolled and the avatar complexity slider doesn't seem to be doing anything. Is there another setting I need to set to fix this? Where is it? What the hell am I doing? I think I'm too stupid to use it.

No, you're just getting slaughtered by the amount of small changes that have happened over the past 8 years.

If you remap the keys exactly as in other Viewers (namely remap strafing back to Shift + A/D/Left/Right and remap rotating back to A/D/Left/Right, which are the major changes) you'll end up with exactly the same movement behavior as in all other Viewers, it's actually so easy you'll want to smash a desk to your face when you're done.

There are many ways to do this but the simplest to do what i just described is:

Double click the first entry 'Turn Right' , press D or Arrow Right (whichever you prefer), hit Bind.

Double click the second entry 'Turn Left', press A or Arrow Left (whichever you prefer), hit Bind.

Select the first two 'Move Left' entries (or just the one you want to replace), hit Delete button at the bottom.

Select the first two 'Move Right' entries (or just the one you want to replace), hit the Delete button at the bottom.

You can also just remove all Move Left/Right entries if you never use Shift + Movement Key and you can always just readd them later. You just change whatever you don't like and/or add whatever is missing to you, adding works pretty similar, you click 'Add', select an action, press a button and optionally one or more modifier keys and hit Bind. Pretty simple stuff. Not as simple as in games where you have a fixed amount of binds (usually a primary and secondary) and simply all available actions listed but i wanted the ability to bind as much as you want the way you want.

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Preferences is obviously the biggest change from all Viewers because it needed something different, with options, options, options and more options being added i needed a way to present them logically and grouped together, while offering a consistent look that works across all preferences tabs that doesn't include just smacking more tabs into tabs into tabs into tabs until you're just swinging from tabs to tabs to find more tabs, besides if i made them all tabs you'd get a scrolling tab list which is ugly af and something i don't want, the alternative would be breaking options further down and adding tabs into tabs (in main tabs) which is just as ugly. A search option has been added (coming from Linden Labs, coming from Firestorm) that you can use to search for options, i've never used it for real yet but it should be good enough to at least give you a general direction where to look for whatever you're looking for if you just enter a keyword that is appropiate.

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Jellydolls are a whole story for themselves. Complexity is calculated differently in BD due to complexity in its defaut state being too random and useless for the user. I've vastly changed the way objects are weighted compared to how LL does it and the result is a much more reliable albeit still 'roughly estimated' impact of someone's complexity with much higher values. BD in complexity can only be increased to a max of 800.000 before you have to either un-jellydoll people, have them as friends or simply set jellydolls to 'unlimited' because 800.000 is already considered a crazy high complexity (and most people, especially human avatars, easily go past that) which implies that someone is walking around with a decorated house worth of attachments on his avatar which will negatively impact your performance a lot, depending on the complexity sometimes just one person alone is enough to reduce your framerate by half, sometimes it takes 2 but its usually not far off of ~2 avatars. You can of course as said, simply set the complexity limits to 0 (infinite) and turn the feature off but unless you have at least some backup (like max avatars turned down to 5-10, to impostor people) you'll most likely see unusable framerates very quickly, but that's up to you then. Personally i'm confident enough to turn jellydolls off now that i have a Ryzen, i'm still getting around 30-50 FPS depending on the people that are currently fully rendered but i'd recommend not doing so unless you have FPS to spare.

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@Seicher Rae

About entering contests, i had something similar happen with a Flickr group. It was a group about my Viewer for completely unedited pictures ONLY. When i looked through the gallery i saw lots and lots of clearly photoshopped pictures and i thought well time to add some unedited ones then, that's the rules aren't they? I added a few pictures to get them approved (yes they needed to be manually approved too) and shortly after i got kicked out of the group with the message that i violated the rules because my pictures are edited. Can you imagine? You, the creator of the very Viewer the entire group is about, getting kicked out of the group for violating the "No Edits" rule with unedited pictures. If i had any religion, i would have lost it then and there. Man i was so pissed.

Edited December 25, 2019 by NiranV Dean

[Fauve Aeon]

On 12/24/2019 at 1:35 AM, Amina Sopwith said:

You can't really be suggesting that it's somehow more acceptable to be sexist/racist/ageist in SL just because we can "change" those characteristics on our avatars?

boring reply, skip if you already knew I wasn’t in any way suggesting ‘isms’ are OK.

Of course not, none of those are ever acceptable. Nor was I suggesting people *need* to ‘change’ anything that they don’t want to change about themselves (or their avatars). But I do actually know people who very much enjoy leaving some of their burdens of RL limitations or yes, bias against them behind when they come into the virtual so that’s what I was thinking of. 

The ‘whole other conversation’ I referred to is about what people choose when we have choices in our avatars about some things that we have no choice about in our RL human selves, and our experiences...not that any kind of ‘ism’ is ok anywhere, ever. We are who we are as the human drivers of these avatars in the end always, after all!

My avatar is me but it’s also somewhat ’not me’ sometimes, especially visually...by my own choice. I see her as the sum of my choices. But ‘who I am’ and what I do while driving her makes an impact, on myself and on the others I encounter and that is (to me) also a real experience. I have a different experience sometimes depending on the choices I make about the appearance of my avatar. I have a very different experience in an 11 yo (SL years) avatar than I do in a much newer one. I have a different experience in a chibi noodle avatar than I do in a doll avatar or as a human (adult or kid avatar). No one talks to me when I’m a tiny Totoro, so for me it is the perfect ‘don’t bug me’ low render weight avatar for shopping or hopping about without much commentary. When I’m human adult female, many more people PM me. When I’m a chibi noodle, the conversations are much less centered on the dating game, when I’m a kid avatar (I’m a member of the New Babbage urchin community in my alt), I’m very careful where else on the grid I go and even who I talk to, a completely different awareness. I always have a fairly current ‘adult human me’ outfit made because there are places that don’t welcome non-human avatars and sometimes I just happen to be a tap-dancing velociraptor 5 minutes before I want to go there. I enjoy it a lot that human is just one choice of many others and my skin/eye/hair color is a click, and that my age, sex and other characteristics can also be choices.

[Fauve Aeon]

15 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

That's the whole point. You DON'T do it in post. It looks bad.

It depends what you want your end result to be. I like both and for different reasons.

I love the unedited snaps, the real capture the amazing moment photos. I enjoy the in the viewer challenge and testing BD is on my 2020 SL Bucket List. I also love to alter and filter the crap out of my shots sometimes, though Lightroom 😉. I never feel the need to pass off photoshopped pix as non, and it does also frustrate me (and here come the peeves) that people will be so snobby about their ‘art photography’ or the ones who even flat out lie about photoshopping. Why?
 

For most of my shots, what I like best for posting or sharing is a crop, levels corrected, stray hair, neck seam or odd thing corrected. So technically photoshopped, but at a level that is commonly accepted as correction, not overly enhanced. Lately some actions do a bit more, but as subtle enhancement, not changes. But again, raw shot is not altered,  altered is altered, why pretend it isn’t. I agree that the level of photoshopping is too high for many of the photos used for official SL photos. On the other hand, it shows what resident photographers are capable of in the medium so featuring them as photo of the day is good. 

Edited December 25, 2019 by Fauve Aeon
Clarity

[NiranV Dean]

34 minutes ago, Fauve Aeon said:

It depends what you want your end result to be. I like both and for different reasons.

I love the unedited snaps, the real capture the amazing moment photos. I enjoy the in the viewer challenge and testing BD is on my 2020 SL Bucket List. I love to photoshop and filter the crap out of my shots sometimes. I never feel the need to pass off photoshopped as non, and it does also frustrate me (and here come the peeves) that people will be so snobby about their ‘art photography’ or the ones who even flat out lie about photoshopping. Why?
 

For most of my shots, what I like best for posting or sharing is a crop, levels corrected, stray hair, neck seam or odd thing corrected. So technically photoshopped, but at a level that is commonly accepted as correction, not overly enhanced. I agree that the level of photoshopping is too high for many of the photos used for official SL photos. On the other hand, it shows what resident photographers are capable of in the medium so featuring them as photo of the day is good. 

Photoshopping is nice if you want to do product images and say get rid of backgrounds or want to edit in price, details etc, everything else can be done out of the box. Photoshopping in SL has reached similar levels to this common over-CGI-ing of movies. I'm not saying its bad, some things need to be edited (in movies) unless you want to blow up thousands and millions of dollars for a scene just to get a nice explosion. In SL however i see photoshopping as annoyance, i see no place for it (other than the aforementioned product information additions), i see no reason to ever edit a picture, SL's flaws are what makes it so unique, prims clipping into each other, texture artifacts, weird rigged mesh deformations, these are small flaws but they make SL what they are and finding creative workarounds for these inworld is much better than simply editing them out. That's the whole challenge i like so much. SL has a problem, find a way to fix it, there are ways, there are many ways in fact.

To give you an example of this:

Do you think this image looks nice? I don't. The whiteout trees, the alpha blending issues, the totally missing interaction of trees with shadows, the trees in the background being way too bright, there are too many issues in this pictures. Lucky for me i found ways to fix these issues. For this matter i added a feature to mask objects and fix what the creator didn't fix. Tune some settings, change things here, add slight depth of field, modify the color palette and poof:

Same windlight all i did was play with all kinds of settings for a bit and fix the trees, completely different look.

 

Here's another example of a nice place that suffers from the creators weird decisions in design:

It looks nice, the whole scene has this cool warm, wet, swampy jungle atmosphere but the prim water is ruining the entire shot, double shadows, pixelated shadows, it doesn't reflect anything... for this scene i added a feature that allows users to change the water height locally, i used it to raise the water level while derendering the fake water prim, this changed the scene completely and forced me to make further changes to lighting, colors and the water as well. The end result is no comparison to the original shot and all that just by raising the water level, replacing the fake water with real water and tuning more settings to match the new water.

This is simply something you can't do in photoshop, this wonderful magic of unlocking that last missing bit of potential in a picture and suddenly a whole new world of options open up, you'd be painstakingly hand editing this picture for hours, for what? When at the end you can still clearly tell that its photoshopped.

This is also something you can't do in LL Viewer either. Nothing of the above final pictures is faked, all fake water has been removed, fake sunrays have been removed (if there were any), reflections are real (from water), the glow is real and coming from the viewer, the colors are unedited, shadows are real and depth of field is also not edited in. This is by no means something you can do by ticking two options and hitting snapshot of course, it still requires time (sometimes an hour or more) to fiddle with all the settings until you're happy with what you see but the outcome is absolutely worth it and it is something i can always show around and say "this is Second Life, how it ACTUALLY looks like", it's not a dream or an edited picture, its reality, in theory anyone can go to these places and fiddle with the settings until it looks "similarly" good (not saying the same because thats basically impossible unless you share the settings, trust me i tried) and if content creators saw the actual potential of their creations like in the above examples they could have used it... its quite sad how some really awesome places get dumbed down by seemingly unfixable stupid mistakes... but that's exactly what this is about, finding and fixing these with the tools available.

Edited December 25, 2019 by NiranV Dean

[Fauve Aeon]

Some of it is exactly as you say, learning to use tools, but few will go this far. I also know that some people will even read the first sentence you wrote above about keybinding to adjust the movement in viewer and just ‘nope’ out. Most people who use a computer rarely change that and full half don’t know how. Or people read some of your past rants (which I find both slightly hilarious and really informative all at the same time) and form their bias. Same with the fact that I always turn into a semi-attractive adult female human when I have to show up inworld to make any presentation despite the fact that these days I really prefer being a chibi noodle. Is it stupid? yes. But is it real? Also yes. 

[Seicher Rae]

New pet peeve: That my computer won't run BD. I'm not sure why it won't, but it won't. It used to but the last few times I tried, it won't work. I stopped trying well over a year ago. It does take lovely photos, if you can run it AND you put the effort into it. It takes a lot of effort.

[NiranV Dean]

13 minutes ago, Seicher Rae said:

New pet peeve: That my computer won't run BD. I'm not sure why it won't, but it won't. It used to but the last few times I tried, it won't work. I stopped trying well over a year ago. It does take lovely photos, if you can run it AND you put the effort into it. It takes a lot of effort.

Pet peeve #4: Problem explanations that are not informative enough for me to make a call on what the issue is forcing me to reply with:

So what exactly isn't working? Does the Viewer not start up? If so does it give you an error message?

[Seicher Rae]

23 minutes ago, NiranV Dean said:

40 minutes ago, Seicher Rae said:

New pet peeve: That my computer won't run BD. I'm not sure why it won't, but it won't. It used to but the last few times I tried, it won't work. I stopped trying well over a year ago. It does take lovely photos, if you can run it AND you put the effort into it. It takes a lot of effort.

Pet peeve #4: Problem explanations that are not informative enough for me to make a call on what the issue is forcing me to reply with:

So what exactly isn't working? Does the Viewer not start up? If so does it give you an error message?

Ha! and LoL.

Well, as I said, I had stopped trying a long time ago to get it to work. I had computer gurus unable to figure out why it wouldn't work. I forget what the exact error message was. But before I responded to you today, I went to your download site and tried again. I did have to use the version for older set ups, as the AVX didn't work. But... the other one did! So I can no longer say my computer won't run BD. I don't think there were two options the last time I fiddled with this. So: My peeve is rescinded. You probably still need to keep yours, I'm sure it happens often.

I'm not sure how soon I can be trying it out because I do stand by my statement that BD takes a lot of effort to use, especially if you've been using only one viewer for 10+ years (I used FS back when it was Emerald).

[Selene Gregoire]

Firestorm has never been Emerald. Emerald was a V1 based viewer while FS is a V2 based viewer.  Phoenix was the V1/Snowglobe based viewer developed by the same dev team and rose from the ashes of Emerald. I was on the support team prior to the transition from Emerald to Phoenix and for many years after. That's how I know. 

[Rolig Loon]

4 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

it still requires time (sometimes an hour or more) to fiddle with all the settings until you're happy with what you see but the outcome is absolutely worth it and it is something i can always show around and say "this is Second Life, how it ACTUALLY looks like", it's not a dream or an edited picture, its reality,

Well, it's what SL actually looks like if you happen to have been using the Black Dragon viewer and have your settings all precisely the way that the photographer did when he was taking the photo.  It's not what SL looks like to most people most of the time, so "reality" is a moot point. I enjoy well-done art photography and well-done digital art. If they are created artistically, I don't see either art form as superior to the other.  As a casual photographer and non-artist, I stand in awe of professionals who can create pleasing high quality images, regardless of the tools they use and whether they portray "reality".

[NiranV Dean]

1 minute ago, Rolig Loon said:

Well, it's what SL actually looks like if you happen to have been using the Black Dragon viewer and have your settings all precisely the way that the photographer did when he was taking the photo.  It's not what SL looks like to most people most of the time, so "reality" is a moot point. I enjoy well-done art photography and well-done digital art. If they are created artistically, I don't see either art form as superior to the other.  As a casual photographer and non-artist, I stand in awe of professionals who can create pleasing high quality images, regardless of the tools they use and whether they portray "reality".

The point of my pictures is that they are just as much "real" as they can get. Anyone can similarly awesome looks if SL would finally get its butt up. Right now i have to fix issues FOR content creators to make it look like that, and i have to change settings (because obviously a region cannot change these outside of windlights) but all of these issues could be fixed if SL gave us these tools (experiences are a tiny step into that direction, windlights another, something like RLVa is another step). Obviously nothing will look good with the same settings you use for a certain scene because your settings were made for a totally different scene with a totally different "goal" but my point is that the overall fancy graphics can be achieved by anyone if there was a general accepted "standard" of graphic settings everyone builds for (not even those we have right now, some build for deferred rendering, some for windlight and some not even for that and still for 2007 graphics). Most of this is up to the content creators, the rest is just LL giving us (or the content creators) more tools to change certain aspects of the viewer to make users have a certain experience they want on their region.

[BelindaN]

It seems I need to test BD. If it generates so much emotion, even as a non gamer non IT person,  but photo addict, its something I need to grapple with

🤔

[Rolig Loon]

5 minutes ago, NiranV Dean said:

The point of my pictures is that they are just as much "real" as they can get. Anyone can similarly awesome looks if SL would finally get its butt up. Right now i have to fix issues FOR content creators to make it look like that, and i have to change settings (because obviously a region cannot change these outside of windlights) but all of these issues could be fixed if SL gave us these tools (experiences are a tiny step into that direction, windlights another, something like RLVa is another step).

That's quite understandable, and I truly appreciate the artistic sensitivity that drives your vision. The results you can achieve with Black Dragon are indeed awesome. My only disagreement is in regard to what constitutes "reality".  If I were color blind, my view of the world would be quite different from what most people see and I imagine that I might resent the implication that it is flawed in any way and needs to be "fixed". Things are only "broken" to the extent that they either fail to work as designed or deviate from some commonly-accepted standard. It's dreadfully hard to find a universal standard for anything, and certainly not art. Creation of art is a marvelous calling.  However, I find the quest for "reality" in art to be not merely elusive but somewhat pointless.

To make the issue personal, I do not have stereoscopic vision.  Never have.  I am told by "normal" people about the wonders of 3D but, frankly, I have never felt that I am missing anything or am in any way flawed. My reality is 2D, and it's beautiful. It's just not yours. Taking things outside the visual realm, I imagine that people who are deaf, gay, or shorter or taller than I am could say the same thing. 

[Maryanne Solo]

BD? 😲 omg lol. Whats it doing being in an LL forum 😧?

Anyways.. possibly my ultimate pet peeve is when you've mixed up the most amaazing outfit and you're dying to check the whole view,
just as you focus,
your avie AO turns her back to the camera. 
And it happens 90% of the time. 

That is just THE most annoying thing in all SL for sure lol.

[NiranV Dean]

14 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

That's quite understandable, and I truly appreciate the artistic sensitivity that drives your vision. The results you can achieve with Black Dragon are indeed awesome. My only disagreement is in regard to what constitutes "reality".  If I were color blind, my view of the world would be quite different from what most people see and I imagine that I might resent the implication that it is flawed in any way and needs to be "fixed". Things are only "broken" to the extent that they either fail to work as designed or deviate from some commonly-accepted standard. It's dreadfully hard to find a universal standard for anything, and certainly not art. Creation of art is a marvelous calling.  However, I find the quest for "reality" in art to be not merely elusive but somewhat pointless.

To make the issue personal, I do not have stereoscopic vision.  Never have.  I am told by "normal" people about the wonders of 3D but, frankly, I have never felt that I am missing anything or am in any way flawed. My reality is 2D, and it's beautiful. It's just not yours. Taking things outside the visual realm, I imagine that people who are deaf, gay, or shorter or taller than I am could say the same thing. 

I think you got the whole "reality" thing a bit wrong, i mean that these shown graphics are not some faked eyecandy some company is showing to boost a product, these graphics are actually archievable, they exist for anyone to use who spend the time to do so and similar graphical fidelity could become the new standard if SL just moved forward. I'm basically showing "tech demos" of what could be if SL wanted to.

[Rolig Loon]

1 minute ago, NiranV Dean said:

I'm basically showing "tech demos" of what could be if SL wanted to.

That's fine, and they are beautiful.  Just don't pretend that they are reality.  They are something that can be created with Black Dragon or could be created by LL, if they wished to.  An alternate universe, perhaps.  😎