Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.0 "Spring Dragon"

The big 3.

3 words.

Bugs and fixes.

Initially 3.0 was planned to be a huge update with lots of changes in the UI but when i started working on the places window i realized what a huge clusterfuck it is and immediately lost all mood to continue so no massive UI overhaul. I'll progressively update the UI over coming updates as usual instead.

Instead, this update contains mostly fixes and some up to date LL code with the latest release. One thing right away, the media autoplay issue is still not fixed even after several fixes from LL, i won't touch it, i don't care about autoplay media, it is the single most annoying, least interesting and most forgettable feature in any Viewer and i have no idea how to fix it even if i wanted, i'm happy i can find my way through big parts of the rest of the code without my head exploding.

Anyway, fixes include outfit filter having black text on black background, the sidebar and display tab not refreshing when loading a preset and HOPEFULLY the poser not being overridden anymore by certain human mesh heads (god these things only cause issues, i swear. Texture corruption, alpha issues, no mod, overpriced junk ~ i'm looking at that shitpile of 5000L$ for a goddamn head ~ and animations that override even the highest internal animation priority).

Most of my time however was wasted on getting two new buttons working (and making the code look somewhat decent) to move entries in the animator up and down by one row. Hooray for that! No need to add something in between and deleting the old entry, now you can just move it up and down as you see fit.

Black Dragon 64x - Update 2.9.9B "Spring Dragon"

Just a quick update.

All it does it changes the HTTPPipelining debug option to off again because it is causing texture corruption for some people. I finally managed to reproduce it on (who would have thought) human-heavy SIMs with human-heavy-content.

You don't necessarily need this update, you can just switch the option off yourself in 2.9.9 but this is so you get the latest version properly working if you're coming in new or updating from much older versions.

Should your stuff look like this, please either update or make sure to disable the option yourself, then clear your cache to make sure all corrupted textures are flushed.

Black Dragon 64x - Update 2.9.9 "Spring Dragon"

Whew.



Another update. Lots of updates. We can't get enough of them.


Finally adds the windlight transition options into the windlight environment settings window.

Changes a few quality options around and caps the object quality (VolumeLOD) to 4 max, sorry but it had to be done.

The missing shadow distance options have been added to the machinima sidebar and i made another pass over some options, SSAO Effect for instance can now be set lower and higher than before, same with Glow Iterations and Width.

I hope to have the friendlist sorting fixed now, tell me if its not.

In this release the old original Screen Space Reflections from Tofu make its comeback, i tossed away all my changes and tweaks to it and only applied the latest ones, see how you like it. It's slower but should look nicer overall (hopefully).

Old Black Dragon SSR

Todu's original SSR

Tofu's original SSR + my latest tweaks

Shadow distance has been tweaked to have roughly the same precision as it had before with 200-400m, this means shadows are more pixelated closeup but are overall sharper on normal every day usage distance.

A few here and there tweaks on the UI to fix a few stuff, mostly tiny offsets and annoying scaling issues that you probably don't care about at all. Viewer UI care... stuff i really care about.

Black Dragon 64x - Update 2.9.8 "Spring Dragon"

Scorched Earth.



This is merely a small bugfix update to get rid of some small but pesky troublemakers.

No more crashing when closing the Viewer while preferences is still open. Yo dawg i heard you like closin' the Viewer so i fixed a close crash so you can close all windows while closing the Viewer...without crashing.

The input/output microphone tab didn't work either, should be fixed now too.

Also enabled coordinates in the navbar by default because let's be honest why the fuck isn't this default.

Last but not least, shadow distance which was changed in the last update introduced an issue that might have caused you to have no or only extremely pixelated shadows unless you changed the shadow distance manually, this update renames the debug setting and changes the sliders to allow much finer tuning, this should automatically reset the shadow distance option to its proper working values. Also 1 is now pretty much 1m distance rather than having to set 192 to get like 4-8m distance depending on which slider you were using.

A new sky preset has found its way into the Viewer too.... it's the one i used for the dancing snake and snake pose picture in the 2.9.6 post. Called 'Dramatic Fog'.

Black Dragon 64x - Update 2.9.7 "Spring Dragon"

Another year another update.



This update is mostly coming this early because of the worsened problems with human heads that have gone completely out of control after i removed the fix that was meant to fix it in the first place but was causing similar issues. Turns out removing fixes that break things fixes these broken things but breaks more things which need to be fixed by fixing the fix only halfway through. In other words, it should now be resolved. HOPEFULLY. If not, maybe this is the time you want to become a furry and get some of that Snakish Snek business going, if you know what i mean.

Anyway. Other changes include the inclusion of an option that uses a higher color buffer for normals which should eliminate the artifacts on reflective surfaces when projector images are... bend and transformed out of shape. This option comes at the cost of a tiny little bit of extra memory but will increasingly hit harder with higher resolutions, but i trust you don't run 4k without proper hardware now don't you?

Looks better, doesn't it?

I switched the shadow distance option to be a Vector4 too, that means its 4 options now, one for each shadowmap, this gives much finer control over each shadowmap but will need some tweaking in the future, for now i've set the defaults to equal roughly 128+m and have decently sharp shadows on close and mid distance. I realize they work a bit weirdly still, i'll work on it.

Media has been really annoying with the latest code merges and i think i've fixed that one too, media should hopefully no longer automatically start playing over and over after you teleport if you have media autoplay disabled. Phew.

Other than that, minor cleanup all over the place as well as a new Patron 'Candy Heart', thank you for your support and thanks to everyone else for their continued support.