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.

Sunday, August 4, 2013

3. August Update

Yesterday.

Not very much happened, nothing much of interest for you users but alot for me basically.

On wednesday i opened OPEN-196/STORM-1960, in hope i could bring in some large scale visual optimizing of LL's current XUI/XML files. Sort, align and generally clean them up, make use of all the new fancies of the V2 User Interface everywhere where possible and therefor take a huge load fuckups and just throw them into the trashbin so we can finally forget about them and get a well organized User Interface, at least internal in XML. Nothing you would probably ever see but a clean XML file also means it's easier to read, faster to edit and most important, it's easier to understand for new people, which would have been a chance for many new modders to take a look into these files and start modding, creating new User Interfaces or Skins.

That was the plan... until...
Oz Linden wrote a comment - 02/Aug/13 5:56 AM 
Ok... slow way down. I said this in email to Niran, but it didn't take, so I'll say it again here:
We are absolutely not going to do large scale reformatting of XUI now. Period.
Well. Guess that's it for the big part of this project. Again the one guy who slung me into the jira creating process, is the chosen one who decides to pretty much kill this whole project. Thanks Oz. I think i just havn't explained my project enough beforehand otherwise you wouldn't have told me to open a Jira ticket for it just to "kill it" shortly after.

Oz named a few issues why this isn't going to happen anytime soon but his issues are issues that will exist forever, basically saying that this part of the project (which is the biggest part and basically the part that made me start all this) is never going to happen. I think those issues are just trivial, they are issues we only have to fix once but again my project was probably just planned way too large, sorry but i can't get happy with things like "oh change this X to Y for religious reasons..." things. I want to enhance Second Life where i can, where my few available skills become really usefull, where i am in my nearly unbeatable element.... but let's not get into that again.

So what did i actually change? Only 2 things, one because so many people wanted it and it was so easy to implement (even a total noob could do it in basically every Viewer).


It doesnt need words, doesnt it?

Other than that i implemented (during my livestream) the Animation Time Factor feature which i introduced over a year ago in Nirans Viewer.



It allows you to customize the playback speed of an animation, even negative values are possible making your animations play backwards! I used that feature here for example:


That's it for today :/ havn't done anything else.

Niran.

7 comments:

  1. Hi Niran

    I would just like to say that I totally agree with you regarding the cleaning up of the code, it helps to encourage folks like me who are thinking of trying to edit it, or mod it, even if I only change a few colours here and there.

    I can tell that Oz has left you disappointed but I am curious, does this mean you can't do that for your own viewer?, or does it mean it won't be done by LL any time soon?

    I hope you can do it the way you want for your viewer and well if LL are going to shoot themselves in the foot it won't be the first time.

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    Replies
    1. It means that i can't do it for LL as they "can't" afford the additional work that needs to be done later in the merging process. I was willing to do everything for them. Manually.

      That ultimately means that i can't do it for my own Viewer. I would cause myself additional merging work every time i merge something from LL that touches any XML file.

      Usually i'm only applying my little cleanups for some parts like the Friendlist which is a major code cleanup and removed about 50%+ of the code. Even those things are things that might cause me alot trouble in future merges. Tools is one huge example of an floater that is a huge clusterfuck and has reached a state i would call an emergency, it needs cleanup. ALOT. I can't do it however, Tools is a subject to change at all times right now due to Materials, any huge cleanup i do in Tools might cause me alot of trouble merging stuff/fixes. If i wasnt super alergic to working with other people and had a Team like Firestorm does, i would have done all this long ago because fuck this additional work, there are lots of people who could help me with that.

      Also. I'm lazy.

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    2. I would have offered help, even if I had to learn it first, but yes, I sense that if you wanted help you would have asked for it a long time ago.

      It is such a shame that LL are being anal, when your doing stuff they should have done. So basically they are saying they are happy to stick with bloated code, and apparently don't have the money to fix it, what a bunch of BS.

      Anyway keep it up please and we all know it's LL and not you, it is so lame, that they can't even take up your offer.

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    3. It's not just my offer(s). Several other people are getting lots of rejections too. Firestorm has tried many times to help LL and they declined their stuff (i guess thats good anyway for some things but there are also alot good things, especially fixes). So LL saying they don't have the money or time to do it is, yea as you said, bullshit. Instead they have months and years of money and time to redo the perfectly fine working Chat System and Baking System... such a waste of time.

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  2. you are amazing thank you for your patience

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  3. Niran, the additional work you have done on the viewer recently is nothing short of amazing it's coming on really nicely, any eta for a test release, the grid really needs a decent materials enabled viewer with many items now being released which utilize material processing, other viewers are holding back but BD was one of the first to implement it and it would be awesome to have something more updated than the previous release to play with, if people don't understand the concept of test flag it as an alpha or something :)

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