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, December 14, 2016

RLVa is here.

Penny PattonTuesday, December 13, 2016  
Except the new version doesn't have RLV support yet, which is a complete dealbreaker. I use it too extensively to make up for LL being so bad at their jobs. 
I get wanting people to use the latest version but you've locked me out of the last version of BD I could use. Not cool.

What you say now huh? :<

Ya r8 m8 dat's wat u get 4 complainin'.

EDIT: This will soon be the next minimum version, until then automated update downloads will be broken.

Monday, December 12, 2016

Game Over Old Versions

You will not be missed.

Rest in pepperonis.

No seriously, you may have noticed (or not) that if you use a version prior to 2.5.6, the Viewer will automatically download (although not telling you, just indicating it via the slowly filling loading screen loading bar) the most recent version and force you to install that version (which you can of course close if you want but you wont be able to login with the old version anymore). So finally, after 4 years, all old versions will be done for, once and for all. This was not a one time thing, knowing that it works (and works even better than expected, the working install wasn't actually planned) means that in future i'll continue to block off older versions.

I told you all many times that at some point i'll do this if i ever get my hands on a working way to do it because it's really annoying dealing with old versions, not just for me but also for SL in general.



Well, f*ck you old versions.


I've also changed a few blog options. Most importantly i removed comment moderation, i used it to get a notification on comments because they are really easy to miss otherwise, instead i enabled sending emails whenever someone comments on any post. I'm sorry for all those comments i missed, Google changed the blogger main page several times and removed the "there are comments awaiting moderation" notification which is why i didn't see them. Things should be better now.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Emergency Release 2.5.6

I didn't expect to make a release this early and in this stage but the situation requires it, its highly likely that Bento will go full release tomorrow so i had to push this update as quick as possible. It contains all the latest stuff i was working on in its current state. Read the patch notes on the blog or login screen for further information as to what changed. The release should be coming up in a few minutes.

EDIT: Shit they already did while i was busy compiling.

Friday, December 2, 2016

Monthly Write-Up: November

The next issue of my monthly write-up. This time with lots of bad news for the entire family, everyone loves some family fun!


Interface



Last month i pushed an update that fixed the an issue that prevented local chat from popping up when the local chat was not a separate floater and the conversation floater it was nested in was closed/hidden. I changed the Appearance floater to open with the "My Outfits" tab selected instead of the new "Outfit Gallery", limited the memory sliders between 128mb and 1992mb and made the chat tags [Moderator]/[Developer]/[Mod][Dev] finally reliable.


Graphics



Graphics wise not much has changed, i disabled Object Object Occlusion by default as it should net you some performance gain unless you are using an AMD card in which case you might want to re-enable it.


Code



I fixed a bunch of crashes that could occur when you toggled Deferred Rendering options while Deferred Rendering wasn't even enabled, yes i know you should have Deferred Rendering enabled anyway, why should i care, because reasons... and edge cases. While at fixing those crashes i cleaned up the code and overhauled some parts a bit, making it more reliable and preventing more issues as well as making it able to return values which someday i might actually use.

Bento was merged again, a few new changes came with it, nothing too fancy, just a few fixes for things we probably didn't even see.


RLVa



It's still planned to come. Really it is, i just haven't started on it, it's the very last thing i'll do, when everything else is done.


Upcoming



I'm working on a few things, namely UI finetuning, fixing the appearance floater panels, cleanup all over the place, fixing one or two reported issues and adding some new stuff for you to play with. It's not particularly exciting to talk about it, really. I can show you a picture of what's coming.


It's still WIP but i'm getting there. It's shape edit btw, no more pictures, just plain sliders, all of them have the same size, boring isn't it?


Snapshots







Videos