Disclaimer

Black Dragon is MY Viewer, i decide which feature i want to add and which to remove, i share this Viewer to show the world that user base size is not important, i do rate quality by effort, thought and love put into the project, not some rough estimated numbers. I consider feature requests only if i you can name proper valid reasons i can agree on. It is my (unpaid) time i'm putting into this project, i'm not here to cater to every Joe's desires.

Monday, June 18, 2012

Release 1.42 (1381)

Yay for Monday!

*nerdy* i´ve effectively reduced the Viewer application size by 228kb! thats nearly like taking the main rendering pipeline code out (about 260kb , has aprox 8000 big lines of code) , the texture folder also has been cleaned up heavily and has been reduced by about 5mb for me!*nerdmode off*

This week is a little experimenting week will explain that in a special part of this post later!
now to the changes

User Interface:

The biggest change here in the UI happend internally in my code , recently someone came to me and told me that Speakers and Nearby aswell as Friendlist (if they are nearby) doesnt show the Speaking Indicator , so i´ve traveled around the world to find out whats causing this , i was very shocked when i found out. It was the biggest part of the avatar list item´s (which show icon , name , distance , permission etc) code. I had to remove huge amounts of code to make it show again but that caused the layout to completely break , so i removed even more and more code to make that avatar list item completely uncoded in terms of positioning, i moved that stuff completely into XML (i think less code and more XML is always better because its easier to modify and more dynamic) , from now on permissions will initially slide in and the voice speaking indicator is shown below the name behind the distance label. Basically from what you see its not a big change, so i hope you like it
and dont forget to greet the alligator!
I´ve enabled URL parsing in loading screen tips and special thanks page , that means i that i can now add cool SIMs or Places to loading screen for you to visit!

The toolsfloater was completely broken in Spanish UI , which i now fixed thanks to Mechatoy who told me

I´ve added a toggle checkbox to my Machinima Sidebar for switching between Region default and Custom Windlight quickly , this was a suggestion by Maddy Gynoid who´s also writing a blog.
But beware its German , so English only people probably wont understand much there
Echt Virtuell

Texture Category and Size Consoles have been completely removed from the UI now as they werent working/showing up anyway

Translation:

I´ve fixed some translations in my UI including the Favbar and the new sound quickpref button aswell as the media button which wasnt translated , the login label "Different." is now translated to German

Rendering:

I´ve fixed that eww white squary thingy appearing when you click on "select face" in tools floater but dont select a particular face , this also fixed the bug that the selected face highlight wasnt shown weee!

Full Res Textures has been removed out of all menus and panels , Audit Textures has been completely removed out of the code because it was just buggy and/or not working

Sponsoring:

Recently Mechatoy Mekanic came to me , telling me that she really likes my Viewer *sniffy mode on* - who doesnt? - *sniffy mode off* , and wants to "support" me by "sponsoring" my Viewer , i told her that would be ok as long as it doesnt come to annoying ads like we had in Kirstens Viewer with those Meeros on login - aaahhhhrrg ... So this week will be a test week for you , me and Mechatoy , i´ve placed some small links and things here and there that lead to her shop or webpage. And i want to know if its ok for you as it is or if its still too annoying or bad in some other way.
Those things include:

  1. -Login sponsored by Label and Icon (which leads to webpage when clicking on it)
  2. -Special thanks entry with links to inworld shop and webpage
  3. -Menu entry in NV - Webbrowser to her webpage
  4. -Loading screen tip telling you that this Viewer is sponsored by her (i should really change that to is "supported" ... not sponsored , that sounds like i NEED that...) with a link to her inworld shop

If we find out in this week that this whole "sponsoring" thingy isnt good , i will remove it again

And please keep in mind that "sponsoring" or any support isnt a guarantee for that i will continue , the Viewer is a fun and learning project and "could" theoretically be closed done every day because of something that happened , so please make sure you dont try to "help" , "support" or even "sponsor" me because you want to make sure that i continue. However enough of this crap , continue reading and enjoying my Viewer as if it were the last day .... long as it exists :) you never know when something suddenly changes

Bugfixes:

GetMediaParcelURLFilter spamming and potential crashes have been fixed (hopefully) , those were caused by oooooooooollld code that was still in the viewer asking the server for those informations which doesnt respond to it

The "Open Webbrowser" button in Navbar was previously leading to google.de... i changed that to google.com , however it wasnt that bad anyway because Google automatically detects your language anyway :)

Snapshots:






Enjoy,
Niran

Changelist:

1.42


SH-2689 - move first_fully_visible static into avatar class, bake-related logging
SH-2968 - simplified and consolidated DebugAvatarRezTime logging
shrinked Viewer executable size by 228kb!
shrinked textures folder by about 5mb and over 150 textures!
added ability to toggle regio/windlight via debug everywhere
added Mechatoy to Special thanks page and included links
added a new random tip that this viewer is sponsored by Mech Toys
added Sponsored by label and icon to login page , clickable leading to her webpage
added toggle to Machinima Sidebar to switch between Regio/Windlight - per suggestion
added Version and Channel display to login page
added ability to display clickable links in special thanks and loading screen
changed open webbrowser URL from google.de to google.com by default
changed webbrowser menu entry into a submenu containing different websites
changed layout of Avatarlistitems and made them initially slide in permissions
redone Avatarlistitems in XML rendering lots of code obselete
removed extreme amounts of Avatarlistitems code due to XML changes
removed and cleaned up topbar code
removed lots of old Parcel code
removed Texture Size Console and Texture Category Console from menu
removed Full Res Textures and Audit Textures from menu and graphics panel
removed lots of obselete , old and unneeded textures in textures.xml
removed all non needed textures out of all skins
removed participant icon disabling for now , will return later via UI
removed some login code parts
removed login help (F1) button
translated login page "different." label
fixed new favbar not beeing translated
fixed Media and Soundbutton not beeing translated
fixed Speaking indicator not shown in Nearby/Speakers Avatarlistitems
fixed Spanish tools floater totally broken
fixed white squares appearing while selecting faces
fixed white select face highlight not beeing shown
fixed GetMediaParcelURLFilterCap errors in log

10 comments:

  1. Darkness Default is not supported atm , it was created for those that cannot get along with my extreme changes to the UI , but i will have to remove it soon as it is just stupid to follow those that want the old UI back , they should either do it on their own or dont use the Viewer

    ReplyDelete
  2. Agreed with the above from Niran!
    Im loving tis new version but strugle with a problem:
    the 64b veersion instaler didnt work as the others, it prompt me to unzip the content to a folder!
    Still after i found that it was trying to instal on a diff 1 then c:/programs files x86 i just crated a folder there and extract to there!

    ReplyDelete
  3. yea im sorry for that , i fixed that , Silverdragon told me yesterday that i fucked up the 64bit installer... it also didnt show any changelogs , should be fixed now please redownload it also contains a last minute fix

    ReplyDelete
  4. "I´ve added a toggle checkbox to my Machinima Sidebar for switching between Region default and Custom Windlight quickly..."

    Thank you for this! :-)
    I've done a quick test and it woks fine.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I have noticed that the 64 bit version of Nirans does not actually register as a 64 bit application according to windows, see screenshots :

    http://onikenkon.com/screenshots/nirans_01.png

    as you can see windows sees this app as *32 indicating its 32 bit and not native 64 bit, what is the major differences between the 32 and 64 bit viewer? and why does it not show as 64 bit?

    ReplyDelete
  6. 32bit = No Large Adress Aware flag
    64bit = Large Adress Aware flag

    Large Adress Aware allows a program like Second Life to use more than 2GB per executable , SL needs this very badly otherwise SL will always and very quickly crash at around 1,2 GB RAM usage , however doesnt allow unlimited RAM to be used , Windows 7 has an hardcap at around 3,6GB resulting in a crash at about 3,4GB RAM usage. Reaching this extreme amount of Memory usage is nearly impossible for me , i´ve tested it by setting Draw Distance to 1024m and going to Ahern rezzing 10 SIMs all in my View at the same time with over 6000 different textures , which only got me to 2,6GB. You may get to 3,4GB via Memory leaks which should be hopefully rare.

    ReplyDelete
  7. ok thanks for explaining. i was able to get to 3.6gb and crash it, but it took 1 million mesh cubes, or 850,000 prim cubes

    http://nebadon2025.com/screenshots/1000000_prims_01.png
    http://nebadon2025.com/screenshots/850000_prims_01.png

    ReplyDelete
  8. Fantastic viewer, I love it. I missed only one thing and it will be perfect : The ability to zoom on people from the radar, I do a lot of screenshots and I need that feature. Please, tell me it's possible to implement it. Go on with your excellent job. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I have to agree, that and a inbuild Ao,
    But only if it does not compromise with the quality of the viewer.
    I used Phoenix for long and i can only say, a radar, a inbuild ao and it would be perfect but...
    Niran allows me to build, Niran alows me to cross as many sims as i want, gives me amazing performance and graphics quality, even when i use full shadows and Dr, on utra settings plus 18AF and 16HqsAA forced via VGa control panel.
    It has RLV!
    So i donpt want it full of useless gadgets, and if radar and a inbuild Ao, that are not uselss at all but can make Niran«s worse, then i don't waant them!
    The simple, the best!

    ReplyDelete