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, November 12, 2012

Release 2.0.3 (2262)

WARNING: My Viewer uses a Depth of Field Resolution of 1.0 by default! this can cause serious FPS drops (if you zoom so close that your camera would start mirroring itself) up to a freeze at which your drivers will "freeze" and Windows will automatically start the driver recovery (black screen for a few seconds), this can either be prevented by disabling driver recovery or by pulling Depth of Field Resolution to a lower value, it can also be "prevented" by lengthening the amount of time (2 seconds by default) after which the driver recovery should kick in, this will give you alot more time to just turn the camera around/zoom out or generally clear Depth of Field again without the drivers crashing and therefor your Viewer crashing (however this needs some registry hacks, please see a tutorial on how to do these and please only do them if you know what you are doing!)

NOTE: To all you people having problems with always re-baking avatars and objects, THIS IS NOT ONLY MY VIEWERS FAULT! It happens in all other Viewers aswell, so far users on Singularity, Catznip, Linden Viewer, Phoenix and Firestorm confirmed its happening to them aswell! Not sure tho if its a widely spread Viewer issue or Server issue.


Sourcecode:


The Viewer again has undergone some heavy changes internally, i rebased my code on Linden Lab´s latest Beta again so it contains all its shinies and also not so shiny things (if there are any) , those shinies so far include a fix for rezzing friendlists/grouplists causing extreme FPS drops, reducing memory usage, some pathfinding changes and fixes, group handling code for groups with 10k people, localization of server messages and other stuff i havnt yet noticed...

User Interface:


A few fixes here, a few fixes there, add some salt everywhere...

I fixed those pesky green ad-hoc conversation icons that plopped up behind avatar icons when having IM/Group toasts active.

Also the invisible login button of connection overlapping the "close viewer" button is also gone now...well its not gone its just shortened more so even with opened preferences you should be able to click it normally.

Pressing ESC with opened "Set Voice Key" floater will now close it, in next update i will also make ESC close Preferences without you having to click cccept or its menu entry (or shortcut).

I changed the Script Editor´s color theme completely, inspired by Microsoft Visual Studio 2012´s color theme, have a look! it looks really nice


Graphics:


Graphics havnt been touched, just "fixed" the anti shadow acne. Here are 2 examples of what i mean...

















I MIGHT have fixed an compatibility issue with Exodus´s Post Shaders (i should tell Geenz about that fix if it works) that caused some video cards with older OpenGL especially ATI and OpenGL 4.0 to be unable to enable Vertex Shader and all its options, the same fix might also fix the issue for some other people that cant enable Deferred Rendering or Shadows and so on.

Performance:


Performance should have been drastically increased in terms of its longlivity, before, in Deferred my Viewer went into "crawl" mode really quick due to 1-2 avatars already occupying all its memory, now that the memory usage has been reduced drastically to a point where i can go into a club with 35 people and still only use 1.0gb memory, it will take ALOT longer for the Viewer to break down into crawl mode. "Crawl" mode will also usually only engaged in Deferred Rendering and higher so for all windlighters theres nothing to fear, nothing should have changed for you anyway.

BTW:


Oh and... i got bored again so i recorded a super smooth 30 FPS video with active Deferred and Tone Mapping =D



Snapshots:


















Changelog:




2.0.3

fixed refresh snapshot label getting truncated
fixed "set voice key" and "set middle mouse" button had inverted functions
fixed anti shadow "acne" (small shadows vanishing on distance)
fixed (potential) some people not beeing able to enable Vertex Shader or above due to Exodus´s post shaders
fixed green ad-hoc conversation icon
fixed Login to Second Life button overlapping the close button when prefs were opened
fixed mostly all rendering related breakdowns , a few are still there :/
fixed groupslist/friendlist loading causing extreme performance drop or freezes up to disconnects
rebased code completely on Linden Labs latest beta , that includes alot of changes/fixes
reduced memory usage and memory usage buildup extremly
merged alot of translations especially for all non supported languages
cleaned up some code and XML files everywhere
changed ESC button to close voice key floater (will do same for prefs in next update)
changed "dublicate" label to duplicate
changed Script floater color theme to a MS Visual Studio 2012 inspired color theme
changed snapshot floater refresh label background a bit
changed german "save to computer" label to match the panel button
tweaked default glow strength a bit
removed some unused and not working achievements

12 comments:

  1. This is a very good viewer, i always thought so. But there are some reasons for me to have to use another one, instead of this one:
    1. Windows transparency: I have great problems to read the messages and chat since EVERY windows, also if I select no trasparency in the preferences, are always partially transparent. After few minutes of use my eyes starts to be confused and I can't use it anymore. I've to go back to another viewer.
    2. Niran told this is not a viewer for developers, for this he refused to add some little features in the build tool, like the ones FS has. And now he worked on the script colors. This means he cares about developing... So why not to add too the copy/paste for prims position and parameters in the build tool? It sounds strange to me... Two little changes that, if added, will make this my unique viewer... it is so sad...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 1. Im sorry that you got eyes that cant get along with ~10% Transparency but i will never change that atlast not for my main skin.

      2. This is not a Viewer intended for "building", however that doesnt prophibit me to change the layout and colors of the building and scripting windows if i dont like them.

      Delete
  2. Niran this viewers performance is amazing....I love it...the grp/ppl finder bug has gone completely and my fps is higher...but for some reason with this version(vs the previous version which worked fine for me in this instance) when I goto my surf sims to surf, the waves no longer animate....they sort of stutter, and it eventually crashes the viewer. So as a test i replaced the viewer .exe with the previous one and the llcommon.dll(as it gave me an error that the .dll was the wrong version) and loaded the newest version that way. The stutter was gone however the grp bug had returned. I thought this may help you in some way. Mikayla xoxo

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes. I´ve seen in LL´s repo that this bug has been re-introduced and now re-fixed

      Delete
  3. Excellent! No more scary (sometimes crash) pause when you open the friendslist - thanks :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. I agree with Magnus ... Yay! Fast friends lists again! But, I had a quick photo session, and I got frustrated that every time I saved a picture to my computer, the snapshot window backed out to the first screen, and I had to click back into "save to my computer" again, reset the custom resolution, refresh the image, and save to computer. For every single shot. This is a major pain for a photographer.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You only have to click save to my computer again , custom resolution should still be intact as long as you dont close the window , refreshing the snapshot when you change settings is normal. Do i have to do a Snapshot tutorial to show Photographers how to work? xD

      Delete
    2. No, thank you. But it would be better if once you click "save to computer" it stays there until you close and re-open Snapshot.

      Delete
    3. will have a look , thats just a very easy and small change

      Delete
  5. Hello, I've just updated my Nirans Viewer and maybe I'm blonde but I can't see the connect button. When I try to connect with my Enter keyboard, the viewer makes everything except log in

    ReplyDelete
  6. I seem to have found a bug. My viewer is set to use my own browser rather than the internal one. If I click a web link and my browser (Firefox) isn't running the viewer hangs; if Firefox is already open it's fine. That's not what supposed to happen.

    ReplyDelete