Dragon 1.0.0

Dragon 1.0.0

Dragon is a faster linker for Black Ops III maps and mods. It reads the same sources as the stock linker and runs beside it: Blackbird links with Dragon when it is installed and hands a project to the stock linker for anything Dragon can't link yet.

Built from source commit 3986fb0 (the commit dragon.exe -version prints; the source is not published).

• Fast. Only what changed is rebuilt: a relink with nothing changed takes about a second and a script edit about half a second, where the stock linker takes many seconds to minutes. Scripts and other small files are compared by content, not just date, so an edit isn't missed.
• Lua included. Dragon compiles Lua itself, with the same output as the stock linker's. L3akMod isn't required.
• Stock assets. With the Stock Library index built, a map can name any asset the game ships and Dragon takes it from the fastfiles with its dependencies. No copy in your project.
• Stock sounds. With Ultrasound 1.1 or later, the shipped sounds your aliases use are carried too.
• Big models. Models above 220,000 faces, which the stock linker refuses, now get auto LODs (up to 1,000,000 faces), and large models convert several times faster.

Known limits

• The first link with the Stock Library index can use 3 to 4.7 GB of memory, and the first link after installing converts every auto LOD of 40,000+ faces once.
• Apex can't preview Dragon's hybrid LODs yet; it keeps showing APE's.
• If the game has the map's files open, Dragon stops before writing (exit code 0x0BB10004). Close the game and link again.
• The setup is unsigned: Windows may ask you to confirm it the first time.

Install with dragon-setup.exe, or unzip dragon-1.0.0-win-x64.zip into the Black Ops III folder (it holds bin\dragon.exe).