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.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

How to effectively destroy Niran.

What you need:

-Second Life
-Lots of bugs in Second Life
-Lindens
-Community
-TPV Devs
-1x Niran

Instructions:

Let your Niran find one of the above mentioned bugs that occour in Second Life , it will make him happy and we will need him as happy as possible so the predefined end is as devasting as possible. Now bring in one of your Lindens and make Niran open a Jira for the bug he found , make him create repositories , fixes and all that unnecessary stuff so he wastes as much time as possible , make sure to give him a feeling that he will get it fixed. Let him try to get as much people from the community as possible to support him to successfully fix this issue , now bring in the TPV Devs and keep them collared like animals so they know that they cant do anything against you , just let them be the collared Devs they are , they will do their job pretty well. In best case they will tell your Niran that he cant do anything about it and that they wont support him. Wait some time , let stuff be stuff and watch how your Niran will waste lots of time to prepare and do all kinds of shit to get his bug fixed as good as possible. When he´s done with preparing everything , creating documents , scripts , patches , repositories and all that stuff its the right time to beat his face with a Mace. Close his Jira , tell him that everything he did was totally pointless and you´re laughing your ass off watching him waste so much time in hope he will do something good to make Second Life a better place.

Additionally make a Snapshot of his smile as it literally turns around 180° and pops out of his face.
Profit.

Again thanks to everyone who tried helping me with
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/OPEN-162
I think its time to bail out here and give up on everything , its all just a waste of time if Lindens and TPV Devs  just keep Second Life as broken as it is. I hope you´re happy with what you´ve done , i hope you have fun seeing me having pain in the ass like that

for my users , i will do one last release sometime soon (not sure yet) and i guess thats it then , i will just return to what i´ve done prior to creating a Viewer that doesnt try holding the users hand and wants to improve Second Life instead of keeping its broken state.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Release 2.0.8 (2432)

As always , clear cache ( , settings and viewer folder aswell if you´re coming from pre 2.0.7 versions)



User Interface:


The "Special Thanks" page in About Viewer was updated , i forgot that last time ... i updated the HTTP Textures tooltip which still said "its broken" which shouldnt be the case anymore atlast not that hard as it was before =D

The useless "Resolution Divisor" has been removed because its useless and the Fog Distance in general graphic settings have been fixed , previously they were disabled by Fog Distance (yes by itself) and controlled Vertex Shader (causing all graphics to go up n down) , apart from that i translated the cloud noise selection and added the Animation Speed menu into Advanced in which you can control ALL animations , not just your own , it will (yes it will really do) change the speed of everyone´s animations by 10% steps , you should try it :P


Windlight:


I included a new daycycle with all its presets made by Penny Patton , she said its made for the new "Layered" cloud noise image , try them out!


Mouse-Steering Mode:


I had some feedback on the Always-On-Mouse-Steering Mode and i´ve tried to implement all suggestions as far as possible , on the way i "overhauled" the whole Mode , it will not use a hacked mouselook code anymore , instead it will use the original Mouse-Steering code which is used when you left-click hold on your own avatar , that means that you will not be able to open menus with right click anymore BUT you will be able to HOLD right mouse button to make the cursor appear and interact with the UI (usefull for quick rezzing or inventory management , attaching and all that stuff). It also feels smoother and faster now and its shortcut is now bound to "V" instead of Alt + F1 , that makes it even easier to toggle in and out of Mouse-Steering Mode. There are still 2 things i couldnt get to work yet , first... crosshairs... no matter what i do , no matter how i calculate the middle of the screen.. it never shows up or if it shows up it has a few 100´s pixel offset which is just crap. Second , your camera will always "reset" whenever you move , thats kind of annoying because it will counter your Y axis making your camera "normalize" to a straight forward look as long as you move and this will make looking up/down harder when you´re moving (probably the only thing it DOESNT use of the original Mouse-Steering code). If someone finds the part of code that is doing this , please tell me.


Misc:


I cleaned up some XML files here and there , aligned them a bit for better viewing please even tho probably no one will ever see them , also removed some empty lines in code and all that other clean up stuff... you know..

Sounds that were played "locally" where flagged as User Interface sounds , that means they were unhearable if you (like me) mute the UI , which is really dumb , so i changed it back to normal sounds , local and inworld sounds will now be both muted again when you mute normal Sounds (might change that to something neutral so local sounds can be heared ALWAYS except SL is muted completely)


Snapshots:












Changelog:


2.0.8

reduced HD cloud noise image size to 1024x1024
cleaned up some XML and code files
changed shortcut key for Mouse-Steering Mode to just "V"
simplified the splashscreen a bit more (smaller)
simplified the mouse-steering mode to use internal camera code
updated Special Thanks page
updated the HTTP tooltip
added Penny Patton's new "Fantasy Overworld" daycycle made for layered cloud noise
added Delete/Refresh buttons for settings presets
added Animation Speed menu to Advanced menu
added ability to right click hold to show cursor in mouse-steering mode
removed Resolution Divisor from preferences
removed "uninstall.bat" due to rumors that its not allowed to share "bat" files
fixed Fog Distance disabling/enabling Vertex Shader
fixed local played sounds beeing counted as UI sounds instead of normal sounds
fixed cursor not re-appearing after mouse-steering is disabled
translated cloud noise selection

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Release 2.0.7

WARNING: 
Clean your cache and your settings , clean your viewer folder aswell , remove EVERYTHING of this Viewer and do a clean reinstall!
Note: this will fix your windlight x is missing y problem!
Update: added always-mouse-steering mode info!

Yup after weeks of chilling , relaxing , doing nothing and ...doing nothing i finally wrap up a Release =3

Rendering:


I/you/he/she/it made alot of progress here , first of i see a future for Second Life´s graphics again =D , with materials coming soon and alot other improvements , Second Life will probably do a moderate to big jump forward especially with system requirements , this will hopefully slowly cut off the people who still think SL is an old piece of crap that is only used to chat on a mobile device , SL might have been planned as Chat at first , if at all but thats about 10+ years ago , wake up people , this is Second Life 2013 not some piece of 1998 crap you can easily emulate on your smartphone...anyway lets get to the changes...

I played a bit with my shader files and fixed that extreme overglow effect when sun is reflected on a shiny surface , it kept bugging me until i was sick of it , heres how it looked before and how it looks afterwards













at the moment i also keep track of what Tofu does in his repository , im always trying to keep up with his genius Screen Space Reflections , but thats not the only thing he does , in the past he often did some quiet changes from a little hidden place , surprising us with some great effect , in this case SSAO , last version i implemented his better SSAO again and in this version i´ve tweaked my settings to make SSAO appear suuuuper smooth and nearly zero pixely , have a look!


if you´re not sure what SSAO actually is... well heres the same snapshot with SSAO (Ambient Occlusion) off


also Tofu´s SSR now seems to reflect water a bit , which is awesome but still needs work , i guess he knows that and is working all day on it already , but take a look at what Tofu is doing anyway




looks great for now right? i bet he will get the maximum awesomeness out of it when its done.

Apart from that i´ve also tweaked my glow settings a bit and switched the DoF filtering to Anisotropic which hopefully increases the quality , as usual you will have to clean your settings to see everything new and your cache while you´re already at it.

User Interface:


I´ve done nearly nothing big here that is worth explaining much , except a fix for the login username and password entry so you wont try to login anymore whenever you tab from one field to another...

also the ability to switch cloud noise textures which has been included long ago in Kirstens Viewer has been implemented , not sure how he did , but to be honest , i really dont care because i did my own method and it needs a relog , you can set a new cloud noise image in the sky preset editor. Here are 2 examples of how your clouds can look like!



both pictures have been taken in 3940x2116 resolution and are downsized to 1920x1058 , as you can see there are no tiling issues anymore :) anyone wanting to do higher snapshots than 4000xYYYY are probably very sad because it wont work anymore , but i tell you something. If you start complaining , go. Home. They finally fixed it after so many years and you dare to complain , you should really be ashamed.

Last but not least , i gave chat , inventory , appearance and people a default position so chat will as example appear on the left bottom corner on first start , you can also use Alt + R to open the Region/Estate floater and the Machinima Sidebar will push everything aside by default now , because i think the overlaying one just feels broken as it overlaps stuff and renders it unreadable/unusable.

Beta 3.4.5


brought alot of changes , please see the changelog for most of them , but the most important i want to highlight here are (potentially) increased performance , ability to upload 60 second long animations , media volume functionality in Vista and higher aswell as alot others! be prepared to encounter tons of bugs , i´ve only tested it a few hours since merge , no promises here.

Server Side Baking:


Sorry Oz , i will not implement it , it breaks RLVa literally everywhere where it could get broken , until Kitty hasnt updated RLVa to work with Server Side Baking , im not gonna implement it. RLVa is important for me and maybe alot of other people , you should really think of incorperating it into the Official Viewer so everyone can have it , its such a nice tool that can be used for so many great things and even inworld games!... which i have been playing the last few days...

Always Mouse-Steering Mode:


Forgot about this one , sorry , thanks to Penny Patton for a reminder , this update includes an always on Mouse-Steering mode , you can enable it with Alt + F1 , it will hide the cursor and make your avatar rotate and look around like in a shooter (like if you click and hold on your own avatar)

Please be aware that this is the first implementation , its buggy and just implemented , not fixed , not finished , nothing its just in there for now , shortcut and all that stuff will change with next update , also note that after exiting this mode the cursor will remain hidden , press ESC (cancel/reset view) to make it reappear again (will also be fixed in next update)

FAQ:


Frequently Asked Questions. I will be writing a FAQ sometime soon , hopefully answering all your "noobish" and as you call them "stupid" questions , i will most likely write it as another post and make a link on the right side of my blog so you can always get there quickly.

Snapshots:


As a friendly reminder , i want to show you whats the difference between my Viewer and pretty much all Viewers out there in terms of graphics , the following 2 pictures show you how my bunker looks in a Linden Viewer (left) and in my Viewer (right) as comparison , i hope the differences are more than clear and i think even for untrained eyes , absolutely no explanations are needed here.






Windows only



enjoy,
your annoying Niran.

Changelist:


updated Exodus´s Post Process Rendering
updated Karl´s aligning tool
updated RLVa
updated SSR , DoF and SSAO from Tofu
added 3 new cloud noise textures
added ability to switch cloud noise texture
added ability to use an always-mouse-steering mode just like in shooters
added dropdown to switch cloud noise texture to sky preset editor
added some initial positions for inventory , appearance , chatbar and people floaters
added a shortcut to Region/Estate floater (Alt + R)
merged Beta 3.4.5
changed kbps to kbit/s to show that those are NOT kilobytes
changed bilinear filtering to anisotropic filtering for DoF for a bit better quality
changed path of saved setting presets to your Roaming folder instead of installation folder
changed default Sidebar behavior to "push" instead of "overlay"
changed hide/deselect chat logic more
tweaked SSAO settings to smooth out SSAO extremly
tweaked Glow strength to 0.2 as new default
tweaked shiny to be 6 times less intensive than before
tweaked max curls to prevent even more curl fails sometimes
tweaked profile size a bit
tweaked glow size to 2.6 as new default
fixed automatic login when username or password entry loses focus
fixed some out of view objects not rotating via scripts
fixed ability to disable the inventory sort mode you were using resulting in having none (last)
fixed some warnings in logs
fixed a warning plopping up when trying to preview a no mody/no copy texture
fixed Glow and Camera Angle beeing broken/not having the right value on first start
fixed projected lights vanishing on distance
cleaned up some XML files
INTL-110: fix corrupted chinese character in translation
SH-3275: Run viewer metrics for object update messages
STORM-1854: Adapted the fix based on other open source consumers of fontconfig that were encountering the same error.
MAINT-2209: Parcel name not updating after teleport
MAINT-2185: Unable to upload terrain .raw files
MAINT-2184: [crashhunters] new crash in LLUUID::toString
MAINT-2168: fail with real message if required var PORT not set.
MAINT-2134: Removing llassert() calls that were causing problems with the Debug and RelWithDebInfo builds.  Also, reworked the rest of the methods to only apply in cases where the class instance has been initialized.
MAINT-1991: Attempt to mitigate crashes in GL drivers by encouraging people to update their drivers.
MAINT-1986: patch DEV-50942/OPSDEV-111 fix (rev 28828ba0f0be) from server-trunk.
MAINT-1958: Fix for crash on OSX when resizing window with deferred rendering enabled.
MAINT-1955: Viewer crashes while login after clearing cache
MAINT-1953: Add NVIDIA GT 230 to gpu table
MAINT-1950: Fix for offscreen objects not getting rebuilt sometimes.
MAINT-1942: Increase maximum animation length from 30 seconds to 60 seconds
MAINT-1841: Use NVAPI to force NVIDIA GPU power management mode to prefer max performance
MAINT-1791: Parcel media clear list crash.
MAINT-1748: Users have an ability to sell non existing objects from content of other object
MAINT-1743: "Use Selection for Grid" does not change the grid ruler to "Reference" in the tools floater
MAINT-1742: Child object does not update position while selected.
MAINT-1738: Repositioning the 'Show in linksets' and 'Show in characters' in-world context menu options.
MAINT-1737: Moving files around to replace the Rebake_Region button with a menu option.
MAINT-1724: Viewer crashes while attempt to open '+ inventory' floater that already opened in separated floater.
MAINT-1709: Factor out realloc
MAINT-1649: Fix for objects disappearing on region crossing.
MAINT-1615: Something invisible pushes avatars around on Dore
MAINT-1601: Land remains for sale after purchasing for group.
MAINT-1598: Edit Linked Parts isn't returning creator/owner
MAINT-1589: Update debit permissions dialog (residents deemed frightening).
MAINT-1580: Viewer shows "Unknown Notification" message on startup.
MAINT-1579: Fix for diffuse color being ignored in mesh import preview render.
MAINT-1568: Fix for inconsistent triangle counts when changing LoD sources in model importer
MAINT-1567: Fix for incorrect triangle and hull counts in mesh importer.
MAINT-1562: Convert more hard-coded alert messages to be localized
MAINT-1556: LLSD param blocks should accept enum values
MAINT-1534: Fix for calls to find widgets getting out of hand.
MAINT-1526: Save Back to Inventory has been disabled on server side but stays in UI.
MAINT-1515: min_height is increased to avoid overlapping
MAINT-1503: Disable tcmalloc and fix remaining alignment issues.
MAINT-1502: User is unable to rename script inside content of object:
MAINT-1494: Viewer needs new localizable strings
MAINT-1486: Crash on login (Unhandled exception)
MAINT-1474: World map tracking ring renders in incorrect position with UI scale != 1
MAINT-1473: Resizing floater past edge of screen causes opposite side of floater to move updated resize logic to reset floater extents when resizing past bounds
MAINT-1471: Disable "Share" menu item if there is no item selected in active panel
MAINT-1452: Viewer floods the log file with hundreds of exactly the same lines.
MAINT-1440: Call Tools.TakeCopy instead of InspectObject.TakeFreeCopy
MAINT-1433: Register callback for "TopInfoBar.Action" in handleRightMouseDown
MAINT-1416: Close Mini-map floater after Ctrl-W if it's opened and other floaters are not in focus
MAINT-1415: Empty non-functional 'Take off' menu is presented in inspector
MAINT-1410: make pre-login changes to login location preference affect the login panel
MAINT-1404: Fix for child objects not appearing to move when editing until deselecting.
MAINT-1400: duplicated IDs in two files: notifications.xml and floater_texture_ctrl.xml
MAINT-1340: Media Volume control broken on Vista+ systems
MAINT-1334: Enable "Close all windows" menu item if Snapshot floater is opened. Close Snapshot floater by close all command.
MAINT-1311: Add some logging and assertions to help track down mesh loading errors.
MAINT-1305: llDialog tooltip typo
MAINT-1303: Hide menus and buttons after exiting mouselook if 'Hide all controls' is switched on.
MAINT-1276: Add ability to paste LSL tooltips into scripts.
MAINT-1275: Web session tokens saved in SecondLife.log
MAINT-1270: Fix for some flexi prims becoming flat at some LoDs
MAINT-1183: Tooltip text is changed
MAINT-1138: Fix for crash when picking rigged attachments.
MAINT-1121: Disable "Open" if several calling cards are selected.
MAINT-1118: Change panel mode before closing floater
MAINT-1099: Toggle on MyOutfits panel before showing Wearable panel for new item
MAINT-1069: Change "follows" attribute for scroll list to "left|top|right"
MAINT-1056: FIX Microsoft SkyDrive is not compatible with Second Life
MAINT-1042: Blocking asset avatar prevents future uploads.  Reviewed by Kelly.
MAINT-994: Oskar Linden login issues
MAINT-967: Use stopChat() even if Chat box is empty
MAINT-915: Changed max_length to max_length_bytes
MAINT-913: Added "Zoom" combobox menu item
MAINT-881: Whisper in nearby chat after pressing shift-enter
MAINT-873: Fix for inability to upload meshes on some systems.
MAINT-836: Set title and description for Preview Texture floater if it's called from link in notecard
MAINT-826: Show the first subpart by default
MAINT-712: Set "isLandmarkEditModeOn" to "false" before updating verbs for Landmark tab
MAINT-643: Fix for incorrect lighting and colors in preview displays.
MAINT-628: Fix for seams in high res snapshots when lighting and shadows is enabled.
MAINT-615: Fix for texture animation freezing under certain situations.
MAINT-611: Differentiate between mobile and not mobile NVIDIA GPUs in the gpu table.
MAINT-570: Remove unused memory tracking system LLMemType
MAINT-536: Added missing URL scheme filtering to the Linux viewer, changed URL scheme whitelist. Reviewed by Callum.
MAINT-515: changing llcommon to be statically linked avoids the symbol issues with llcommon.dll
MAINT-499: Don't call handleRightClickPick() in mouselook mode
MAINT-481: Disable creating new folders in Favorites folder
MAINT-436: Set focus to line editor if it exists in alert toast
MAINT-417: The agent_push_backward() updated with new check for reaction of key DOWN, when avatar is in 'sitting mode' and view mode is 'mouselook'.
MAINT-403: Trash button is now disabled if neither landmark nor folder isn't selected.
MAINT-328: Use stopTracking() before each new beacon
MAINT-297: Reset selection after collapsing all folders
MAINT-284: setVisbible(true) after openFloater to allow make_ui_sound
MAINT-274: "media_info" width is decreased to avoid overlaying
MAINT-269: Check if current agent is owner of the parcel before enabling "Buy pass"
MAINT-257: Increase minimum width to avoid overlaping
MAINT-171: Show "Ad-hoc conference" instead of "Session 1" in floater title
MAINT-105: New function to check People tabs visibility
MAINT-73: Hide Stand/Stop flying panel after pressing Ctrl-Shift-U
MAINT-65: Disable "Edit" in context menu if wearable has status "no modify"
MAINT-56: collapse_all_folders() and expand_all_folders() functions are added, which are called by menu items in gear menu.
MAINT-44: Change value for MiniMapAutoCenter in settings.xml to persist after restart

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Happy New Year

Happy new year everyone!