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, April 18, 2018

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.1.0 "Rolling Dragon"

Last bugfix focused update for a bit.



This update fixes a bunch of rolling related issues, for once Save Camera will now save the rotation, loading it again after you already loaded it and the camera has come to a complete halt you'll load the rotation as well, this way you can load position and rotation independently. Also the camera floater now has roll buttons for those who...use the onscreen controls.

Further improvements to shadow accuracy on different altitudes, hopefully the last for a while, as well as slightly higher default shadow resolution on the last shadow map and a slightly smaller default shadow range for the first map resulting in overall better shadow quality.

The light toggles will now persist over sessions, the volumetric lighting tab and its options are enabled again and clicking default on the new camera roll option should no longer crash. Media and Music volume have been lowered down to 20% by default and more cleanup has been done all over the place. Last but not least rigged alpha masking now works on the water surface when looking through the water surface down onto something below it.

This update merged in all the latest LL code including the latest CEF changes which now doesn't flash white anymore when loading but instead will default to black, this especially helps with the login screen flashing up white for a short period of time when first starting the Viewer, yay, that was really annoying.

Cleanup, cleanup, cleanup, stuff, cleanup.


Sunday, April 15, 2018

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.0.9 "Rolling Dragon"

We all hate boring updates don't we?



This is why this new update includes 2 weeks of banging my head against the metal wall that makes up my cozy little parcel place.

2 weeks of banging my head against the wall to bring you something that i had pretty much working right away just in the wrong order but instead chose to try all kinds of ways getting it to work just to find out once again that the solution was there from the get go. I was literally joking about this when i started.

But here it is!

THE MUCH REQUESTED (not really) CAMERA ROLLING! (Hover over it, gear icon and hit HD)



Default bound to Shift + Q/E you'll now be able to roll the camera just like you can do with a controller but now you can finally do it on keyboard too, no need for the flycam. This is something i wanted to do for a long time.

But this isn't over yet, with working camera rolling i simply had to add it to the Cinematic Camera mode too. Have a BLURURURGRGRGRGRGRGRGRUURGRGLRLRLRGR....



Isn't it BLRURGRLLGLLRGRLRLLRLHLRLRLGLGLRLRL...

Amazing! And you can set how much the camera is allowed to roll, by default its set to 0.85 (roughly only 15% strength), setting it to 1 disables it and 0 allows... well see above. This is what SL always was meant to be.





Now if you excuse me ...ohwait there's still more!

I reorganized the keybindings so they'll be listed much more logically now. Both this and the new default camera roll bindings will only work if you've never changed your controls yet, you'll either have to reset them or add all extra controls manually.

Furthermore i added Intel GPU detection, the Viewer will now display on both the login screen as well as preferences that you are using an Intel GPU, if you are using one currently. If an Intel GPU is detected all options starting at Deferred Rendering down to the very last display option will be disabled and you will be unable to toggle them as they don't work anyway, at least currently, why? i don't know but the newly added shader error logging might just tell me what is happening, so if you are using an Intel GPU and you want to help me possibly fix this, open the debug settings and force enable RenderDeferred, then send me your log file (best would be in Discord because it's super easy there).



Some feedback from Skyler Mews regarding the transition time when using "Zoom In" in the radar tab was addressed and it should no longer take up to 10 seconds (1 second max now) to zoom in on someone no matter the distance.

Great news also to those very few people who cannot run the AVX version, i'll be recompiling the Viewer non-AVX sometime later, figured it would be a great time to do this.

And the rest of this update is just a big bunch of commenting, organizing and cleaning up my code. Even code wants to look fancy, even if no one ever looks into it. It brings joy to know that your stuff is well organized and looks clean.




Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.0.8 "Dark Dragon"

"This is no ordinary darkness, this is ADVANCED darkness."


Phew finally.

Still a bugfix update, possibly 1-2 more coming before going back to working on the sidebar again.


Be sure to click the "Gear" icon and hit HD for that sweet sweet quality.


So this update comes with a bunch of debug changes, MU pose chat is now disabled by default, artificial delays after teleport for the sake of precaching are disabled now too and quite a host of debugs have been removed as they serve no purpose anymore.

The Joystick floater has been slightly updated.

Some optimizations in the camera animation code have been done particularly regarding the cinematic camera, mouse smoothing and third person steering mode, they should no longer do slow debug setting calls hopefully improving and stabilizing performance a tiny teeny bitsy more while moving the camera around, you probably wont even notice unless you have nice 60 fps like i do.

The toggle for projector shadows can now be toggled regardless of mod permissions and invert pitch in Mouselook option has been slightly relabeled for better wording.

A bunch of reported bugs have been fixed including, the "Refresh" button in windlight editors not working (in addition they now refresh when reopening them), a crash that occurred when you clicked "Change Selected" without having something selected, the Avatar Mute Settings don't refresh when you change them in preferences and....ohwait that was it.

On request i also added a pitch invert option for third person mouse controls and i added a few first steps to hopefully enable camera rolling with keyboard/mouse controls soon without needing the flycam.


I still got quite a few things planned, Intel GPU warnings, better custom sidebar, camera roll, camera recorder window, possibly some improvements to the complexity window (like actually showing names of other people's attachments), camera offset for mouselook and more optimizations of my own code and stuff in the UI. We'll see.




Monday, April 2, 2018

Black Dragon Guide: User Interface Tour

So you've been booting up Black Dragon and wondering about the different, where's your X and how can you find Y. This guide is going to focus on a few things about the UI you should probably know.


Toolbars

Starting with one of the first things you'll see after logging into Second Life will be your Toolbars. Toolbars are the 4 (2 vertical and 2 horizontal) bars aligned to the edge of your screen, these invisible bars can be filled with lots of buttons. By default you'll find a few of them already attached to the top.


From left to right you'll find the Voice toggle, Conversations, People, Places, the Machinima Sidebar, the Poser, Outfits and your Inventory. You can drag them to any of the four toolbars at the edge of your screen, top, bottom, left and right, you can also remove them or change their appearance as well as add new ones by right clicking them and selecting "Toolbar buttons". You can also get there by pressing Ctrl + Alt + B or by using the main menu (Dragon - Edit - Toolbars).




Local Chat


Local Chat is by default part of the Conversations window because as you might have guessed it it's a conversation (kinda... talking to yourself doesn't count). However not many know that you can simply detach the Local Chat tab from the Conversations window and have it be a separate window or more specifically a movable chatbar.






Balance

If you are wondering where your Linden Balance has gone, it can be found in your Inventory because... well it is part of your Inventory isn't it, that is if your Inventory is some kind of wallet.





Action Wheel (Pie Menu)

The good old pie menu is still a thing in Black Dragon, it can be found in Preferences - Interface - Use Action Wheel and in case you wonder why it's called Action Wheel, that's because it's really more of an action wheel than a pie menu now. It looks a lot different than what you're used to, the layout has been completely overhauled too and unified across all pie menus to offer as much consistency as possible, most options can be found in the same place across all pie menus, jellydoll options are always in the bottom menu, on the right for instance, bottom, top, left and right are the only places that can be menus except the detach menu of course. Menus are also visually highlighted with a blue border color and the entire pie menu has a fancy open animation, although you will hardly see it as it opens really fast, but here's it in super slow motion regardless.








Top Bar


The Topbar, besides additional graphics options this is probably the core of what started once Nirans Viewer. The Topbar is a unique combination of the Favoritesbar, the Statusbar and the Navigationbar all in one, neatly packed to save as much space and offer all functions still. It can also be customized somewhat, you can toggle of favorites if you want to save more space or simply don't use them, you can show coordinates and parcel properties too. The previous and next teleport as well as home button can be found here too. Did you know you can search via your Navigationbar? And did you know you can type in names of landmarks you got to auto-complete them and teleport there? You can also click into the Navigationbar and change the coordinates to teleport up/down or in any direction. Who needs the GetToHeight (GTH) command if the Navigationbar can do all of it already.


Main Menu

The main menu simply labeled as "Dragon" is another unique feature of the combined Topbar although it was more out of necessity than actual desire. It houses all menus you know and love, opens up all additional menus and makes the need to toggle the Advanced and Develop menus obsolete as these are shown by default. No more Ctrl + Alt + D (which was clashing with camera movement control anyway). A neat feature of those menus is that you can undock them by clicking the small double line at the top of a menu, this will undock the menu and make it a window you can keep open and drag around where ever you want it. Handy.


Animation "Synchronization"

Quite a few people keep asking if such a feature exists. Well does it? No, not directly. However you can find an animation "restart" in the Poser window which can be found in the main menu Dragon - My Useful Features - Pose/Animation Manipulator. Simply select everyone whose animations you want to restart and hit the "Restart" button, this is essentially the same as synchronizing them.



Machinima Sidebar


The Machinima Sidebar is a really neat and quick tool to change a few settings for that perfect shot, it has been with us in several incarnations now since almost 6 years and it's really easy to get to too! Just hit F1, you can also click the Machinima Sidebar button if you got that one in your toolbars or simply do it through the main menu Dragon - My Useful Features - Machinima Sidebar. It offers a good selection of all of the most used features (except windlight presets) for you to play with and soon you'll even be able to make your very own version of it!

































Preferences


Oh the preferences, the heart of the Dragon. You'll find an extreme amount of extra options surfaced in Black Dragon, 90% of which are found in the "Display" tab, the very core of what makes this Viewer what it is. You'll find a lot of options for each and every aspect of the graphics in Black Dragon, almost everything is customizable to some degree if you know how.

Each and every option has been labeled properly with their correct name rather than some abbreviation that someone chose to dumb down the name, almost everything can be googled and read up on if you really want to know what it is. In addition i added tooltips for every single option explaining what the option does as best as i can without making it sound dumbed down again, they even show you visually how much of an impact the option has in general both on performance and visual fidelity. All options have also been reorganized and logically grouped to make the sheer amount of options remotely manageable, this is to make sure i'm not just adding more and more tabs making the whole preferences window a tabbing nightmare where you are just navigating deeper into the what seems like a folder structure down until you end up somewhere you don't want to be.

All options are organized from top to bottom, have a streamlined look and follow design rules to make sure everything looks as consistent as possible. Sliders are only used where it makes sense and most of the quality-type options have been simply replaced with radio button chains that offer a much simpler and easier "Low - Medium - High - Ultra" style of setting your quality as it can be found in games today, no more guessing whether 2 is better than 1 or the other way around. This also allowed for a neat little visual aid i added to highlight options that represent the equivalent of Linden Labs "Ultra" setting as well as highlight options that might cause issues or are not recommended to be set such as the feared Object Quality beyond 2. Ontop of all this, the title tabs will show small warning icons informing that something you've set might be problematic and you should possibly look into it, especially if you are having issues, you can hover your mouse over them to get more information on what is wrong. Have you set too much video memory to be used? or too less? Is your draw distance too high? It will tell you! Watch out for the signs!

If that wasn't enough there are also "Default" buttons for all slider-based options allowing you to quickly revert back to the recommended default settings. NEAT! Just another thing, you can actually click the title tabs to open and close them, WOW! Oh another, in case you are an avid mouse wheel scroller, don't worry i feel you, scrolling through these options often meant accidentally changing them when your mouse hovered over them, NO MORE, options will no longer be changed when using your scroll wheel, phew, keep scrolling! So many changes, so many improvements and so much work just for a window that displays some options you might never even look into again.

And all of this for just a tap on Ctrl + P, easy to remember if you think about Control Preferences. You can also open it from the main menu Dragon - Edit - Preferences, really easy to remember too if you think of it as a sentence. In Black [Dragon] i want to [Edit] my [Preferences].