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.

Monday, June 12, 2017

Black Dragon Update 2.7.7: The performance update.

You have been waiting for this for over 5 years.

The ultimate update is about to unleash upon you.

Upwards of 3 quadrillion FPS increase. That's two fish more than tomorrow.
Every graphical feature ever, at no additional performance cost.
All lag SL ever had, fixed including 0.1ms ping for that ultimate shooter feeling.
Oculus Rave Support
And if you thought it can't get better, IT WILL GET BETTER. ALL OF THIS FOR ONLY 9.99€! + Season Pass for the next update. Dayum, what a deal.




Okay no seriously. I thought i should probably optimize stuff a bit, never done this in the past 5 years of making the Viewer so over time the framerate become somewhat unstable. framerate stability should be massively improved and you might even see some FPS gains, i went up from 40 to 60 on my place and for the first time since Nirans Viewer i managed to get 100 FPS again in the sky and even up to 180 FPS if i took off my Avatar, that's even 20 fps more than the maximum i ever managed to get. You will also see the performance impact of the sidebar being pretty much 0 now, preferences has been MASSIVELY improved too, reduced it's refresh calls massively and optimized them quite a lot, so even with preferences open you shouldn't be dropping too hard anymore. Turning around and generally doing stuff doesn't incur too much framerate dips anymore either! Whew.

Further i've also fixed some bugs, added an "always render friends" option, made highlight friends default, finetuned Tone Mapping further, clamped the view angle in sidebar, made ESC disable third person steering in case you accidentally enabled it, improved all preferences warnings and changed the visibility condition of some of them to ones that make more sense and are a bit more forgiving.

To summarize this update: WOW more fps.

Your performance improvements may vary, keep that in mind, having no fps at all doesn't mean you'll have fps now.

What are you waiting for? GET IT, it fixes shit and improves fps, no reason not to get it.

Sunday, June 11, 2017

Black Dragon Update 2.7.6: Interpolation and Position~ation?

Positionation? Really? Very bad attempt at making up words to rhyme.


So 2.7.6 adds mostly a lot of internal work, much of which you won't notice directly but you can now change the position of the pelvis bone and interpolate between positions, YAY!

You can now also set the interpolation method, either linear or spherical linear and its interpolation strength (NOT the time it takes, that entirely depends on the strength).

You can now also double click to load poses and the save button as well as name line editor has been moved to the pose tab... because it really belongs there.... load and delete are still in the other tab.

Soon.



You should now also be able to save without a folder (it should create it automatically).

I snuck in some extra changes too, brightened tone mapping a tiny bit, pitch black shouldn't be completely pitch black anymore and dark/black textures should now show their details again, even in shadowed/dark places. I will most likely finetune this a little bit more.

BTW, the shortcut for locking depth of field focus has been changed and should work properly now. Can't believe i've ignored this for so long even though it was pissing me off really hard every time i used it.

Remember. Start pose, then edit the sliders, otherwise no change and whatever you do, DO NOT ever stop all animations (via the window or menu) while having the pose animation running otherwise you'll end up breaking it and need to relog to fix it. I'll be fixing that in coming updates.

Thursday, June 8, 2017

Black Dragon Update 2.7.5: Poser Save/Load

With this update the poser is now capable of saving and loading poses into a XML file. They're listed in the new Animation tab.



I also added blending between poses and rotations, rotating bones will feel smoother now. I fixed an issue with the vector to quaternion (rotation) conversion that caused some rotations to deform the bone and all its linked bones, rotating it into random directions and inflating it in size. You may have seen it already or know the "Neil Special" animation that does exactly the same.


Fixing this issue also solved another issue with the rotations varying in strength towards the min/max value of the sliders, they should rotate uniformly now. They'll also allow greater precision due to the mentioned change requiring me to change the sliders to -3.142/3.142 min/max value to allow a full rotation.

Finally and most importantly, besides save/load, you can now click a bone once to select it, no more double click needed.

Make sure you save your poses before stopping the pose animation because you'll lose your progress.


Before i forget, you might need to create a folder at:
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\BlackDragon\user_settings\
called poses... possibly... maybe... most likely... almost certainly, otherwise saving won't work. Haven't yet added code to do that automatically. Totes forgot about it, oh well, next version. I know i know... i always find reasons for you to update to that stupid next update... tztztz.

Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Black Dragon Update 2.7.4: Bento Poser

Small update for the poser, you can now select the bones from a list via double click (sorry, single click doesn't work for some shitty UI reason) and then alter the selected bone via the 3 sliders. You should press Start Posing before you do however. I figured you wanted to know.


It also allows you to change all Bento bones. Yup, all 133 bones are now changeable.

Next up: Saving to XML. Editing collision volumes. Export to BVH (possibly). UI improvements. Usability improvements (maybe having the rotation axis circles like in Edit mode).