Black Dragon Viewer: November 2015

Cutting and dangerous, they come in 3 flavors.

Sharp, sharper, dismemberment.

So after a long month i finally got around my lazyness and found some time in between Guild Wars 2, Dungeon of the Endless, Awesomenauts and Fallout 4 to work a bit on the Viewer, it's mostly small stuff but i got some plans for some bigger things.

Starting off with the most important news here, the Viewer is fully up-to-date with the latest LL Release, Chromium Embedded Framework Project Viewer (aka Valhalla Viewer) and the QuickGraphics Project Viewer, these were a huge amount of changes alone but you know as well as i do that i can't just update the Viewer and make an update, i have to do some changes, so let's get to them.

The preferences floater, specifically the display tab has seen some overhauling in the last update, this update will iterate on the previous changes and hopefully make it less pain in the ass to use, tabs will now save their toggle status and the scrollbar won't extend too far anymore. Also, there's a checkbox to toggle if tabs should remember their toggle status. You'll also find the new preset save/load/delete buttons and the selection dropdown there, they are still a bit rough, i think they allow deleting the default preset but that's ok, that's what the monstrous amount of default buttons are for.

The picture also shows the new quick preset icon in the topbar that allows you switching between your presets quickly.

While we are on the topic of display preferences, i added the option to control projector shadow resolutions separately from sun shadows, that means that you can now pull the resolution slider a bit higher for either of them before the Viewer goes poof, i managed to go to full 12.000 x 12.000 projector shadow resolution, the shadows were sharper and better than the original, i could also do a 4k snapshot with 8.000 x 8.000 projector shadow res, you can see the pictures in the snapshot section of this post, here's just one:

Amazing.

Also... Tone Mapping has changed, drastically, Drake kept annoying me that Tone Mapping is horribly broken until i turned in and fixed it, the difference can be seen in the following comparison:

Original (left) | New (right)

But don't worry, i did a first rough pass at changing all sliders to make it look like the old style, sadly the grey-ish-ness that is present in the default rendering is now visible in tone mapping as well...just slightly... but it's there and it horribly annoys me, i'll probably do some more finetuning in coming updates.

The rest includes some misc fixes such as profiles not requiring to log in anymore, missing strings, depth of field and ambient occlusion being greyed out, layout changes to the login panel and so on.