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.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

2.3.0 Alpha

NOTE: Voice isn't working, i'm aware of that and i'm able to reproduce it. It seems to be coming from the inability of your Voice to connect and identify on the Voice server because of a missing CA file, which i took out on purpose because when i privately send the release to someone to test he/she said something about it, not sure what but i guess it plop'd up something. I guess the Voice exe needs this certificate to get permissions to connect which could be a change introduced with the latest Voice "enhancements" which i also merged in my Viewer. I will release a fixed version today which will contain this certificate, don't be surprised if it pops up a suspicious Windows dialog or something... i will ask Oz what is going on and why this CA file seems to be needed. Thanks for your feedback

It's finally there.

Lots of work and fixes have passed into this version, it was literally redone from scratch. No really, it was.

This version features full Materials compatibility, lots of fixes for it, fully functional alpha's, snapshots up to 16.384*16.384, Deferred Rendering underwater, fully functional Depth of Field underwater, optional Depth of Field while building to build with Depth of Field in mind and/or prepare the scene better for Depth of Field, Tone Mapping and Color Correction, fully functional Post Process Glow (again), the Animation Time Factor feature, the original Deferred shiny and lots more! For a more complete list of changes look at the changelog or the feature highlight list.

RLVa was removed in this process to ensure maximum compatibility until RLVa updates.

Nirans Viewer:


Dead. It's dead, leave it alone, it was planned to die as of yesterday, sadly it didn't. It works fine with SSA, i still consider it as dead as it doesn't support Materials and all the SSA fixes, it only supports about 1/8 of SSA. If you insist on using it, do so but i will prevent it from logging in soon.

And stop telling me but Nirans looks so much better graphics-wise. No it doesn't. I know it because i made that Viewer and i made Black Dragon, i know what both can do. You just don't know how to utilize it. Fact is even if i give you easy access to all the super finetuning options most of you run around in circles, crying because you don't know what to do, you then end up asking me how i do my snapshots. It's really not that hard to slap some nice graphics on a picture in SL with any Viewer.

Anyway.

R.I.P


Features:


Animation Time Factor
Enhanced Shadows
Enhanced SSAO
Fullbright toggle
Machinima Sidebar
Materials + enhanced Materials tools
Url tags
Underwater Deferred
Underwater Depth of Field




Snapshots:













Changelog:

2.3 Alpha (not complete)

Added: Small Icon button mode to Toolbars. Finally.
Added: Text Only button mode to Toolbars.
Added: MapChatRingColor Color to Colors.xml for our Chat Range Rings.
Added: Slow Motion Time Factor feature.
Added: Machinima Sidebar and toggle.
Added: All new LSL functions and keywords.
Added: Long missing background texture for the login.
Added: Anisotropic Filtering to DoF. Need a direct 1:1 comparison to tell the exact differences tho.
Added: Shadow calculation "optimizations", make them appear sharper to counter our high shadow blur debug, this way we keep shadows sharp but SSAO super smooth.
Added: Avatar counter to SIM name on World Map.
Added: Feature to prevent the Viewer from receiving any Fullbright information. (Fullbright toggle)
Added: Feature to load/save camera positions.
Added: Third Person Mouse Steering mode, toggable via "V" key.
Added: Missing Down Arrow icon.
Added: Missing start at: SIM-selection dropdown.
Added: Updated and added the new Nvidia GTX 700 series.
Added: URL types for RGB, bold, italic and underlined text.
Added/Changed: Autohide chat and hide on return, some little behavior finetunings, don't remove screenchat when we open chat and only autohide when history is closed.
Changed: Default FoV from 1.047 to 1.10.
Changed: Default Toolbar layout to my every day layout.
Changed: Chat Range Rings behavior, we now show shout and whisper range of our own Avatar and chat range of everyone.
Changed: Default Depth of Field settings to a Real Life camera inspired set.
Changed: Layout of CHUI a bit, realigned everything, removed lots of spaces and made it look less like a total clusterfuck.
Changed: Default Bandwidth to 10.000.
Changed: Force the Chat editors into single line mode.
Changed: Experimental Login background to my newest video.
Changed: LSL function color to match the dark script editor skin.
Changed: Moved the IM tabs to the right side and made some small finetuning changes. Might need some code adjustments for better resizing.
Changed: SSAO Render Algorythm, using Tofu's again.
Changed: SSAO and Shadow Debug defaults.
Changed: Shadow calculation changes for way more detail and way less pixelation, comes at its limits on super low sun position just like any other shadow calculation.
Changed: Viewer Icons, this time mostly correct, Viewer application needs to be renamed to anything else than the original to make everything apply correct.
Changed: Tone Mapping default offsets to prevent extreme darkness with the new Materials fixes.
Changed: Preview Texture layout, made it smaller and realigned everything.
Changed: Play sound previews as SFX sound instead of UI sound.
Changed: Reorganized the whole Face/Texture tab in build tools to show all 3 texture pickers at the same time, alot changes were needed and some bugs needed to be fixed which were happening because it was never intended to be able to see and use all 3 pickers at the same time. Needs some heavy cleanup and some optimizations maybe.
Changed: Debug names for Underwater rendering features.
Changed: Field of View max value to 200.
Changed: Allow wnderwater Depth of Field rendering.
Changed: Progressscreen progressbar style and layout.
Changed: Several layout and style tweaks for Outfits panel. WIP
Changed: Click to Walk off by default.
Changed: Terrain Texture Quality doubled by default.
Changed: Media autoplay disabled by default.
Changed: Wrong Debug descriptions.
Changed: AFK Timout to 0 (never) by default.
Changed: Channel to Black Dragon.
Changed: RenderGlowResolutionPow to 10 by default, make Viewer NOT change that ever.
Changed: Allow Snapshots up to 16.384 * 16384.
Changed: Zoom out/in steps are alot smaller now.
Changed: Default color of our own chat to white.
Fixed: Glow always breaking on first start, stabbing with a knife works. Always.
Fixed: If-logic problems causing DoF to not work right.
Fixed: Camera Field of View not returning to user set value after leaving water.
Fixed: Field of View option in Machinima Sidebar not working.
Fixed: All attachments going to the "Chin" attachment slot beeing broken and shown broken to everyone like they do for me for an unknown reason.
Fixed: Topbar background image for 1.0+ UI sizes and 1920x1080 or lower resolution combinations. UI size below 1.0 with 1920x1080 still bugs out, but wont fix until someone reports it as bug, i dont see the necessarity in adding another image for everyone of which 1% will ever see it if at all.
Fixed: Several overlapping widgets in german UI and aligned the whole build tools a bit, also cleaned up a bit. More cleanup will follow someday.
Fixed: Statusbar and/or its contents not hiding completely when in mouselook.
Fixed: Parcel Selection not uptading correctly when the same or another parcel was previously selected.
Fixed: Home Teleports via Home button showing the progress screen when we are already at home.
Fixed: Camera Spin via Alt + E/C not working correctly when sitting on an object.
Fixed: Open/Close double arrows appearing as grey untextured block.
Fixed: Diffuse color picker not beeing selectable.
Fixed: Texture Console layout.
Fixed: World Map layout, For Sale icon and People checkbox.
Fixed: Send IM menu callback with Compact History mode doesnt work.
Fixed: 180° Field of View for Depth of Field is our maximum at it totally blurs the whole screen. Also fixed a wrong initial value.
Removed: SH-1912 environment shiny completly until there is some way to seperate "shiny" and environment reflection.
Removed: "Press ESC to return to World view" label at the bottom when in Mouselook.

10 comments:

  1. Super great, but I still miss the super fine-tuning of Tone mapping and separate camera views :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Awesome release Niran, thanks for your hard work, dedication and commitment, it's been a while but the latest result is well worth it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Voice isnt working. I'm sure you already know this.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks for your great work!! I agree with Dade, the voice isnt working, I made a clean installation I delete all old folders, and keys in regedit, I put my firewall in OFF but the result is the same voice isnt working. the page https://www.bhr.vivox.com/api2/ I read 403 Forbidden; You don't have permission to access /api2/ on this server.

    With my others visors I have not problems with the voice.

    ReplyDelete
  5. the viewer is looking great, although I'm having a small issue.
    I have a 1st act werewolf, and everytime it starts rezzing piece by piece, and when all of them are visible, in just a fraction of second I get completely invisible.
    the same has happened to a friend of mine using Black Dragon and seeing me.
    would you have any clue about what might be causing this?
    thank you

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's a feature currently only available via Debug.

      RenderAutoMuteSurfaceAreaLimit

      Set this either higher until your Avatar appears or set it to 0 for unlimited.
      It's meant to prevent the Viewer from rendering crasher Avatars/Objects which usually have a high surface value.

      Delete
  6. The "display group" in Prefs won't stay set. Inventory won't change sorting despite different button pushes. Can we have an option in CHUI to use the same font for emotes and regular chat? Thanks for this version! Yay!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Great job, hun! I'm so glad that you didn't let the downers discourage you.

    And actually, it would be great if you released a sortve step by step on how to achieve the best visual quality.

    I know I'd love that! -Calina-

    ReplyDelete
  8. well since you pretty much stopped niran viewer, is there any way to make black dragon look & function the same way niran viewer did? because black dragon seems like every other viewer and niran viewer was something completely different and better.. also it really did have far superior graphics and smoother fps compared to any other viewer even your current one

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No and no. Nirans Viewer had a huge major UI redo you cannot make it look like it. It's not my intention to make Black Dragon look like Nirans Viewer did, instead it should look differently. I want a different approach, different UI, different skin and a different way to go into things.

      Functionality however will be nearly absolutely the same as Nirans Viewer just with a few more fancy things.

      Graphics are already far superior compared to Nirans Viewer which doesn't even support Materials. I'm curious how you judged that Nirans Viewer had far superior graphics compared to Black Dragon if you didn't even use them both to their max?

      I didn't notice any FPS changes between either of them, both run equally fast, just Black Dragon has even more graphical horse power than Nirans Viewer. I even dare to say that Black Dragon runs overall faster because i can have shadow resolution on twice the original resolution without having more than a single FPS impact.

      Delete