Blackdragon Viewer

[KjartanEno]

1 hour ago, NiranV Dean said:

No media? Oof. Missed out on the best part then.

I did use Black Dragon when I had Windows 10 on a drive connected to my computer, mainly to play a couple games on Steam. So, I have seen the media you posted.

43 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

Yes, I found my scribbles, hdparm -i /dev/sdx gets the disk details. I believe you don't have to put the full serial number in, just enough such that there isn't an empty field.

I presume you're on 64-bit linux?

Ubuntu 20.04, LTS kernel with Mesa 21 and AMD OpenCL drivers. I made up a serial number for the 'drive' which has nothing to do with my actual hardware.

I set up Black Dragon and drove through a dozen sims on Nautilus. Then I was going to teleport to another location and the viewer crashed. Attempts to log back in didn't work until I came back in a native Linux viewer. I didn't crank up settings to unrealistic levels and the performance was mostly usable. I won't be driving anymore with this viewer, however. I need parcel boundaries on mini maps for navigation. Sometimes I want to sail my Trudeau boats, so invisiprim funcionality in deferred rendering is preferred. Mini map parcel boundaries and working invisiprims = Kokua. I do look forward to trying out more of the unique features of Black Dragon for photography.

[NiranV Dean]

53 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

I might be a bit naive but I had assumed this was what the draw-distance stepping several TPVs implement did?

HAHA. You'd think that limiting draw distance will force the Viewer to focus on closer things first (since everything beyond the draw distance isn't visible), so far i have not heard a single report that draw distance stepping is effective.

4 minutes ago, KjartanEno said:

I did use Black Dragon when I had Windows 10 on a drive connected to my computer, mainly to play a couple games on Steam. So, I have seen the media you posted.

Ubuntu 20.04, LTS kernel with Mesa 21 and AMD OpenCL drivers. I made up a serial number for the 'drive' which has nothing to do with my actual hardware.

I set up Black Dragon and drove through a dozen sims on Nautilus. Then I was going to teleport to another location and the viewer crashed. Attempts to log back in didn't work until I came back in a native Linux viewer. I didn't crank up settings to unrealistic levels and the performance was mostly usable. I won't be driving anymore with this viewer, however. I need parcel boundaries on mini maps for navigation. Sometimes I want to sail my Trudeau boats, so invisiprim funcionality in deferred rendering is preferred. Mini map parcel boundaries and working invisiprims = Kokua. I do look forward to trying out more of the unique features of Black Dragon for photography.

You... crashed? or did you just get disconnected/timed out?  

[KjartanEno]

2 minutes ago, NiranV Dean said:

You... crashed? or did you just get disconnected/timed out? 

There were Dullahan warnings from WINE, but those could be clicked through. The viewer did CTD, simply closing without warning. I don't expect you to troubleshoot this. It comes with the territory, so to speak, when using programs on unsupported operating systems. Working media isn't a prerequisite for a functional viewer since Alchemy's Linux EEP beta doesn't have a working CEF yet, and it doesn't CTD.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

1 hour ago, KjartanEno said:

There were Dullahan warnings from WINE

I see plenty of those, beginning with the first attempt the viewer make to load up all the information about who's doing what where. I haven't seen them associated with the crashes though.

The crashes I see most frequently in Viewers under Wine appear to be when you turn around too quickly or move too fast before letting things load. I don't know enough about Wine to do more than speculate that there's a layer in between the cache process or the network-IO stages that's adding to the time it takes for things to happen. Waiting until the network indicator goes back from red to green, or textures in front of you have properly rezzed, seems to stop them happening.

[KjartanEno]

After some tweaking in 'Display' preferences, and no additional crashes:

Black Dragon on Linux. I moved the viewer window over to the second monitor which is in portrait orientation.

[Pussycat Catnap]

6 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

No media? Oof. Missed out on the best part then.

The loginscreen:

 

That was another thing that hastened my loss of interest in trying to resolve the issues I was having. I couldn't disable that video on the login screen that made loading the viewer up annoying every time I used it. Once logged in not so bad, but that video drove me nuts.

[NiranV Dean]

4 hours ago, KjartanEno said:

There were Dullahan warnings from WINE, but those could be clicked through. The viewer did CTD, simply closing without warning. I don't expect you to troubleshoot this. It comes with the territory, so to speak, when using programs on unsupported operating systems. Working media isn't a prerequisite for a functional viewer since Alchemy's Linux EEP beta doesn't have a working CEF yet, and it doesn't CTD.

Crashing is an extreme rarity in my experience and most commonly goes back to user error (people crashing their GPU drivers or taking absurdly big snapshots with hardware that simply can't handle it), a teleport fail, faulty login or connection resulting in a disconnect (with the Viewer crashing on getting disconnect making it look like a random crash for the user only distinguishable by a distinct long freeze before the Viewer pops), right clicking things with the pie menus enabled despite the warning that they WILL crash you randomly at some point (not me so far which made it impossible to debug), hence why i'm asking. I'm more than very confident that the Viewer is absolutely stable and should never ever crash under "normal" circumstances which is why i get very anxious when i read crash reports (it usually means i *****ed up something badly and i'd want to fix it ASAP).

1 hour ago, KjartanEno said:

After some tweaking in 'Display' preferences, and no additional crashes:

Black Dragon on Linux. I moved the viewer window over to the second monitor which is in portrait orientation.

That's a nice stock picture, no overblown lighting, no extreme DoF, no crazy camera angles, just straight up plain good looking picture.

4 minutes ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

That was another thing that hastened my loss of interest in trying to resolve the issues I was having. I couldn't disable that video on the login screen that made loading the viewer up annoying every time I used it. Once logged in not so bad, but that video drove me nuts.

You must be taking quite long to click login or your media loads a lot faster than mine does, i hardly ever get to hear the start before i press login. :<

Needless to say i will never offer an option to toggle it off though, i consider it an integral part of the Viewer's charme.

But you are not the only one who is annoyed by the video, there have been a bunch of reports already that an option to turn it off is desired.

Edited April 2, 2021 by NiranV Dean

[Jenna Huntsman]

17 minutes ago, NiranV Dean said:

Crashing is an extreme rarity in my experience and most commonly goes back to user error (people crashing their GPU drivers or taking absurdly big snapshots with hardware that simply can't handle it), a teleport fail, faulty login or connection resulting in a disconnect (with the Viewer crashing on getting disconnect making it look like a random crash for the user only distinguishable by a distinct long freeze before the Viewer pops), right clicking things with the pie menus enabled despite the warning that they WILL crash you randomly at some point (not me so far which made it impossible to debug), hence why i'm asking. I'm more than very confident that the Viewer is absolutely stable and should never ever crash under "normal" circumstances which is why i get very anxious when i read crash reports (it usually means i *****ed up something badly and i'd want to fix it ASAP).

That's a nice stock picture, no overblown lighting, no extreme DoF, no crazy camera angles, just straight up plain good looking picture.

You must be taking quite long to click login or your media loads a lot faster than mine does, i hardly ever get to hear the start before i press login. :<

Needless to say i will never offer an option to toggle it off though, i consider it an integral part of the Viewer's charme.

But you are not the only one who is annoyed by the video, there have been a bunch of reports already that an option to turn it off is desired.

I'll +1 that. I don't even care about the video, but the music blasting down my headset every time I fire up the viewer *is* annoying, so at least an option to have it muted on start would be good.

[NiranV Dean]

3 hours ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

I'll +1 that. I don't even care about the video, but the music blasting down my headset every time I fire up the viewer *is* annoying, so at least an option to have it muted on start would be good.

I've been reducing the default media volume several times due to these reports, i think its like 10% by now, can't believe its still "blasting" people's headset (and mines quite loud too)

[Da5id Weatherwax]

The only thing I'll say about your BD music videos, is that they need to come with a jumbo sized can of Earworm-B-Gone!

After you put up the "Fear Not This Night" one I caught myself improvising around it when warming up for a set in SL and I dont even play that darned game.

The one you posted with "Mad World" is even worse.

[Rydell Wyler]

 

Waves 😍

 

I cant get my shine to show up in BD, shine shows up very good in FS making skin texture come alive so im sure its in the setting but I have hit a brick wall

 

[Aiyumei]

1 hour ago, Rydell Wyler said:

 

Waves 😍

 

I cant get my shine to show up in BD, shine shows up very good in FS making skin texture come alive so im sure its in the setting but I have hit a brick wall

 

Hey there!

The thing about Black Dragon is that it renders differently than the other viewers, so in order to make your skin shine you need to do few things.

First, you need light, just like in RL in order to see reflection or shine you need light to land on the surface(physics and such). It's the same in SL when you use BD, so in order to see the shine of your skin you need some kind of light or projectors. It's also possible to have some settings turned off - BD has decent amount of lighting settings.

Here's a sample settings shader configuration that could help with your problem. You can change them directly from the machinima bar(F1 hotkey)

[Rydell Wyler]

21 minutes ago, Aiyumei said:

Hey there!

The thing about Black Dragon is that it renders differently than the other viewers, so in order to make your skin shine you need to do few things.

First, you need light, just like in RL in order to see reflection or shine you need light to land on the surface(physics and such). It's the same in SL when you use BD, so in order to see the shine of your skin you need some kind of light or projectors. It's also possible to have some settings turned off - BD has decent amount of lighting settings.

Here's a sample settings shader configuration that could help with your problem. You can change them directly from the machinima bar(F1 hotkey)

 

 

Aiyumei 🤩

Yes, I have all those setting enabled as per your screenshot however, I may have jumped the gun on this with a little urgency 👀

I was using Legacy male default skin from the HUD for a shoot.... I will alpha system body and BoM to try some other skins when I log back into BD this evening and see if this is the problem

I was using full body and head alpha with skin in BoM when in FS and shine was fantastic but changed over to Legacy male default skin from the HUD for a shoot before logging into BD and thinking I overlooked that at 03:30 as I was pretty fatigued at that hour 😐

Thank you Aiyumei 🌻 let you know how I get on

 

[Nalates Urriah]

I am another of those that use BD for photos and machinima.

The Poser is just Awesome. While I probably spend as much time working out a pose to avoid edits in Photoshop as the edits would take, I think the result is WAY better.

On 3/31/2021 at 10:51 AM, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Well, now I just feel a bit insulted that no one has ever confronted me about it. Maybe I need to try harder to cam on people?

Funny take... It is always interesting to see what people do with the various aspects of SL.

I have not had anyone say anything to me about my crosshairs in forever. I also notice the majority of people have them turned off.

Maybe we can get a setting to make the crosshairs BIGGER and more NOTICABLE so people will notice me when I am checking them out.

On 3/31/2021 at 2:33 PM, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Wow. It hadn't occurred to me that BD was actually reporting its own complexity calculations to the platform untranslated. What on earth is the point of that? Other than to disadvantage the users of the viewer.

Niran is interesting and opinionated. Not in the least subtle when trying to get people to go with his ideas of how things should be. If you've been around NiranV and followed for a time you get a sense of how hard-headed some of NiranV's opinions and positions are. I think Niran's tactics for moving Lindens reveal a bit of how he sees the world. Once you get a sense of where Niran is in social interactions you can make more sense of 'What's Niran's point" on some seemingly odd choices.

NiranV's creativity and thinking on various aspects of viewer design are outside the box, a definite plus to the community.

However, none of that is meant to mean we'll ever understand Niran's thinking and motivations. I am glad Niran walks Niran's path and contributes improvements to SL.