I'm in a very good mood for some reason, don't ask me why, i know that it won't stay for too long but i want to talk a bit about my plans, they are huge!
Nirans Viewer will be no more...
Soon. (aprox. 30 weekly Betas from here) 2.5.0 will be the final Release this Viewer will officially see, after which i will continue privately (because otherwise i would have to use another Viewer), not sure if i will ever make them available for the public again, the source however will and must stay available to everyone, that means everyone who feels the need to do so can just compile my latest code (which will ofcourse get updates because i love pushing stuff to bitbucket =3). How long will it be until then you may ask... aprox. 30 more Betas of which each is released weekly, 30 more weeks to go, thats still more than half a year and i'm not even sure if i can afford this time so this might change.
So why am i saying that the Viewer won't be anymore but at the same time i say there will be still 30 more Betas? Because the Viewer as you know it right now will not be continued anymore due to several reasons...
1. CHUI.
2. Random FPS drops in Deferred (for me and some other people)
3. I want to redo alot parts of the Viewer.
The Viewer as it is now was always build for minimalistic needs and maximum effectiveness aswell as minimastic but still fancy UI design, while LL continued to waste 600x800 pixel per window on your screen, i was minimizing space wastage, that worked pretty well but right now i'm totally sick of it. Minimalistic UI design also means alot of limits and i hate limits because limits are in some cases just stupid and unnecessary!
<-> Black Dragon???
Black Dragon will be the new name, no more Nirans Viewer, it sounds selfish and stupid, it also reminds me of a certain guy...
So, what am i going to do with it? Alot. I will redo the whole main UI and with it probably revisit every damn floater to work with the new planned style, thats alot work and will take probably several weeks but i dont care, i want something truly different, something no one would ever do (most of my old stuff wasnt done by anyone else too...but, it was just... a game, a little game, a piece of what can be done with the UI and i want more, not just one piece, i want ALL OF THEM :)
User Interface redesign ideas...
This is a work in progress UI redesign, im extremly happy that most stuff works as intended right now, the right upper part will make problems however. This is mostly static, the buttons at the top left and below the navigationbar are all unmovable and unhidable but honestly i dont care, really. It looks better with them and it still wastes less space than... fuck this, i dont care about space anymore!
Next topic on my list are the "Achievements", YES ACHIEVEMENTS, i implemented them long ago but some of them were broken, they didnt tell you when you finished one and the achievement floater simply looked....simple...i'm going to change that, i will make every achievement repeatable, they will award points and they will notify you when you finished one (hopefully). Coupled with a RLVa-like system those points could be used in a inworld store from me to get some cool stuff...or...they could be just e-peen extensions.
CHUI. Yes i know what you think... but you said "I will never ever implement this piece of shit.". Yes, but i have to, no way around it. Coding a way around it is something Firestorm can do, but not me, i dont have time, will and or knowledge to recode literally the whole chatsystem to work like the old V2 system and still include all the new stuff of CHUI, i will simply bash it in and make it work better... as good as i can.
Preferences floater and the panel as it is right now are both somewhat a huge mess, the floater doesnt offer enough space without doing dozens of ugly tabs and the panel right now doesnt quite work like it does in games because SL's User Interface scaling works totally differently than that of games, therefor i will totally redo it and mash it all into the sidebar, yes, you heard right, a sidebar just for preferences! It will ofcourse always open the graphics panel by default because it should somewhat stay a machinima sidebar.
Explain ALL THE THINGS!
After the Viewer reaches a somewhat "finished" state i will start to do a huge "Walkthrough" for my Viewer that will explain all the things, why is X there, why is Y not there and what does Z? Hopefully everything will be answered. It will contain bugs and their solutions if there are any. It will also contain pictures, lots of them... comparison shots and explanation pictures.
Topbar, Toolbars and no Toolbelts...
As you might have noticed in snapshots above i'm going to throw out the old cloud and topbar design and replace it with something hexagony (what a word...), toolbars left and right will work just as before, top and bottom will probably get a double toolbar which allows them to have those "connected" hexagon buttons with offset, not sure yet tho, will have to see how it turns out. I also kind of grew sick of having to iterate 3 different files to make changes to the topbar, i will simply combine it all into one single file, this should make things alot easier.
I might also do reimplement the autohide function and extend it a bit, make it fancier maybe. I want shit to blow minds!
Misc informations...
The new Viewer will include and exclude pretty much everything it does now, RLVa, SSB, pie menus, lots of customisations, tons of graphical fancyness and soon also CHUI and Materials, i will want to make the last release a nuke, not just a bomb.
FEAR ME SL VIEWER AS I WILL TORTURE YOU *SQUEAK*
