Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.0.7 "Dark Dragon"

"Still getting darker."


I fixed a nasty shadow clipping issue. I think i'm moving in circles here.

I also fixed the Vignette sliders being cut off in preferences, for the... i stopped counting. This happens every time i add a new option.

Lots of main title checkboxes in preferences have had their checkbox moved down due to the label offset fix, no more.

Also Motion Blur will work on hopefully most if not all objects again at the cost of a bit performance that is but don't worry you'll hardly notice it because...

Lots of changes from Linden Labs including loading only minimal level of details for jellydolled people, improving memory usage and performance slightly. Also boob physics finally seem to be stable no matter the framerate, took them really long but hey, boob physics are rocket science and probably the only thing women truly understand that is their natural bounce, smacking them to bounce them around is totally a men thing. Lots of crashfixes are included too absolutely fixing crashes you'll probably never see at the cost of me crashing instantly on teleport in my first session, what a great start i hope it will stay at "once", a Viewer randomly crashing once or twice a day is of no use for me. Lastly a metric fuckton of changes regarding Voice have been made, Voice should be much improved now (haven't tested it yet but we'll see).

Besides that not much, it's just a small time bugfix update from my side and getting the Viewer up-to-date again.

There are still quite a few things planned for the future. Next up is ordering for the custom sidebar among other things like redoing the About Land window.

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.0.5/6 "Dark Dragon"

"It's getting darker."


This time coming with double the update trouble!

I've massively revamped and extended the custom sidebar functionality for those and made it a lot more resistant to purposely trying to break it. You can now add titles and space tabs to the sidebar, all of which can be removed if you want. The Viewer now also comes with a default custom layout that emulates the original sidebar which is still accessed by default when opening the sidebar and will stay there for as long as i'm not fully happy with the custom sidebar.

I cleaned up a few more things and here and there and made some tiny improvements on shadows on different altitudes although this will still need further adjustments as everything. Rome wasn't build over night.

I also finally had enough of this stupid label offset that checkboxes had for... since.... um well all the time actually, their labels should not be on the same height as the checkbox itself rather than offset upwards which looked absolutely ridiculous. I MEAN LOOK AT IT. GODDAMNIT LOOK AT IT. IT'S HORRIFYING!

3.0.6 mainly made the sidebar more crash resistant against attempts to create faulty or broken widgets resulting in a crash and ultimately making you unable to start the Viewer unless you delete your sidebar config. I wasted another day on this just because someone thought it would be funny to simply not enter values and simply press "create widget", creating an empty widget. Well that's what you get for doing so! A well deserved crash.

Black Dragon Guide: Movement Controls

So. Two-hundred-and-sixteenth time. I've been counting how often people have asked the same question and it is obvious the FAQ is not sufficient anymore to explain this.

To clear a few misconceptions right from start.

No, this is NOT broken.
No, this is NOT bugged.
No, this is NOT weird.
No, your camera doesn't stay behind your back when you move left or right.
No, it's not like "in Firestorm", its ANY Viewer. Stop crediting them for things LL did.
Most importantly, no, this is not something camera related as literally everyone thinks.



What's the issue? You start the Viewer and hit A,D or Arrow Left or Right and your avatar moves to your left/right. This is not weird this is the industry standard since... 20 years? Pretty much since 3d games became a thing. It's called strafing, although compared to games it does not look like the usual strafing e.g looking forward while walking sideways, yea that's SL for ya. Strafing is set to replace the rotational movement by default, why? Because every game that isn't a complete pile of shit does this by now, just a few special snowflakes haven't catched up with something that has been established back in doom and quake times, namely Second Life for instance. Second Life as such classifies as game, more specifically as MMO, and even more specifically as Simulation and Sandbox. It's a Sandbox MMO and it offers what is quite standard for said MMO type, third and sometimes also first person camera, those are in 99% of all cases set up to have A/D for strafing rather than the long gone turning. But how do you turn then? You use your mouse of course. We didn't get this input device for nothing but clicking UI elements, its there offering extremely precise movement in 2 directions, enough for looking around in a 3d world such as Second Life. You can simply click and hold the left mouse button on your avatar to enable "Steering Mode" in which... you guessed it, steer your camera, dragging your avatar behind (yes your avatar behind, it follows your camera rotation not the other way around). You can also simply hold your right mouse button anywhere that is not the UI and drag your mouse around to do the same (this also works after alt-camming).

But this guide is for those who simply cannot use what is considered the most efficient, most convenient, fastest and most precise, industry standard way of controlling your third-person-viewed avatar/camera.

The secret reason i changed this is to teach you something. I do this all the time. Everywhere. I do the thing that seemingly no one else has the time to do today. (Guess why all the names of graphic features are labeled with their correct names, it's so you can google them and get some actual information on them: Wikipedia for instance. NO ONE KNOWS WHAT ADVANCED LIGHTING MODEL IS GODDAMNIT)

So what you want is, you want to turn around using (most likely) the arrow keys, rather than strafing to the left/right as it is by default. This is actually very easy and i don't know why this even needs explanation but...

In Preferences - Keybindings, you can find several lists filled with controls and actions. It looks like this.

Action tells you what it does, function is the internal name of the action, button is the currently set key that will trigger said action and modifiers are extra keys such as CTRL, ALT, SHIFT. In order to change the strafing back to turning you'll have to find and select the entry that reads "Turn Left" / "Turn Right" bound to Q and E and modify them by hitting the "Change Selected" button (or double clicking the entry). A new small window will pop up. This new window displays the old keybinding at the top and the new one below, all you need to do now is press your new desired key you wish to use to trigger turning either left or right, in this case either A/D or Arrow Left/Right. After pressing the correct key and having it show up below, hit "Bind" and repeat the process until you changed everything you wanted to change. In order to prevent you from strafing and turning at the same time now, you'll have to select the "Move Left" and "Move Right" entries that have your keys bound you want to use and delete them so your keys are not bound twice to two different actions. You can check if you did everything right by pressing your keys and if you did everything right your keys should now do these:



That's it actually. In case you REALLY need help, here's a the entire instruction in a 10 sec nutshell.

3.0.4.

Well BOOOHOOOOO Niran, BOOOOOOOH. You broke all the things.

Kay. *releases 3.0.4*

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.0.3 "Dark Dragon"

I thought i'd split this up here and make another update since you've been waiting for way longer than i'd like.

This update does pack a punch though, well internally that is. Took me much longer than i like and i'm still far from done... sadly.


Anyway.

First and foremost.



I made a new loginscreen video. Watch it at super smooth 60 FPS, only the finest of fine. Mh-mh.

I might make a few changes to it still, i'm not yet fully happy with it. We'll see.


Next up. As said in my previous post, the recorder window... it is there and it... works... kinda but really all it does right now is basically showing you the waypoints, you can add new ones and can play them back but it's buggy and finicky and really not fun to use right now. It had to make way for something else.

Which brings me to... the poser changes. I'm still investigating ways to make posing easier for everyone not me and thus i made some changes in which order rotations are applied in the poser, this does improve the slider-to-avatar handling a lot but... it causes a million new issues, poses are saved differently now (old ones are still compatible) and when this is finally going to LL this is going to be an unacceptable solution for server side synchronization. I'm thinking of splitting the poser into an extra window or at least multiple tabs, one for local posing that uses the new rotation orders and another tab for the server side synchronization implementation which will use the old way. I'll have to split them anyway at some point otherwise this is not going into official. I'm planning to have the poser start into "Edit Mode" just like it is right now with the option to switch to "Create Mode" which will allow exporting animations and will put you into the default T pose to prevent poses from being "stolen" (are you fucking kidding me? 10L$ 5 minute poses being stolen... what have we become...). If the poser does anything weird leave me some feedback, i'm sure i've missed something somewhere... probably.

In case you want to improve rotation orders yourself, there's a dropdown labeled by default with "NONE", you can use this to change the order in which rotations are applied, if you find a rotation order for a bone that works better than what i've set them to, just tell me, i couldn't test all bones but most bones should have a good rotation order set by default now. It's not perfect but its better than what we had before and makes posing a lot faster.



This should hopefully no more. One slider will now ALWAYS roll, the other two will move, still the second movement slider will however start rolling if you point up straight up/down relatively to the default rotation of the bone (thisisjusthowquaternionswork).

Now the thing that took me probably the longest out of all of these changes...



Customizable Sidebar. Currently you can add only sliders and checkboxes until i make radios actually take values for their sub-widgets... and other stuff.

It's not much yet, no debug setting dropdown (meaning you have to know the debug settings or look them up), possibly a million ways to break this stuff by simply not entering anything and probably weird stuff that might even crash the Viewer, use at your own risk.

Most of the other things are minor changes, improvements to shadow precision on different altitudes (hopefully), forced shader level 2 (this might further increase incompatibility with unsupported GPU's like Intel HD GPU's) and some experimental compiling changes that will completely and totally crash the Viewer instantly the moment you start it if your CPU is older than 2011. Sandy-bridge (Intel), Bulldozer (AMD) and up ONLY. It should have varying levels of performance improvements though (the reason i could take that login video with super smooth 60 fps without microstutters). If the Viewer crashes instantly when clicking the shortcut, you're most likely using an incompatible CPU, if that's the case... well tough luck. If the need is high enough for such a version that doesn't have these changes i might consider making one, otherwise this will be the new standard.

3.0.2 will stay up for a bit JUST IN CASE. This is not the rule, it's an exception, expect it to vanish at any moment i think 3.0.3 is sufficiently stable.