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.
Mostly just crash fixes and under-the-hood improvements from Linden Labs. Nothing fancy to show off but if you find issues, particularly with IM delivery do tell me, they changed quite a bit there and i haven't had extended testing sessions yet.
As always a fair share of nice pics i did since the last time. (I still wish i could make the poser work on others... someday maybe.)
A lot of stuff happened since the last update, shortly after the last update my GPU began to show it's broken state more and more, with more games and applications simply crashing leading up to until a few days back when my GPU failed so hard that it started crashing even on my own Viewer and ultimately crashing so hard that it would lose the monitor signal and not recover from it, forcing me to hard reset. If it wasn't for my very generous brother who just so happened to gift me a new GPU early for my birthday which is on the 22rd this May, just in time as my GPU basically exploded.
RIP GTX 670.
You served me well for 6 years. You pulled through all those demanding games and showed everyone that big numbers aren't everything, it is sad to see you go due to a power supply unit failure. You made SL look so amazingly awesome on such a low-entry GPU and you managed 60 FPS too.
o7
Farewell old friend.
Now that we got this done... i'm now running on a shiny new GTX 1060. Needless to say that the framerates in SL have drastically improved...not. OFCOURSE NOT, as anticipated already. Getting roughly 10-33% more FPS but Screen Space Reflections can now be pushed all the way up to max, Depth of Field however still instantly burns it down to ashes.
Fine then, to the update then.
This update i finally got the login screen video redone and improved with the newly released full version of the song i used. (This was still done with my dying GTX 670). I think the new one is a much welcomed improvement but see it for yourself.
The full song can be found here if you're interested.
Next up is the sad announcement that i will not continue the customizable sidebar. Instead i will remove it for now. The reason for this is that i wasted multiple weeks trying to fix a big performance issue with the customization process without any success. Whenever you changed something in the sidebar it was rebuilt and added ontop of the previous built, hiding the old panels, this caused the sidebar to accumulate more and more invisible panels which had to be iterated through causing increasingly longer freezes as the Viewer was rebuilding the sidebar. I wanted to make it so it actually removes those panels but this caused a crash every single time and trying to fix it showed absolutely no success nor progress for 3 weeks. Since i can't continue trying to fix something and delay the update i chose to scrap the feature and instead focus on other things.
This brings me to the Poser which has gotten another round of some much needed improvements. Rotation orders are gone, rotations are much better, rotation sliders are bigger now for higher precision and compatibility with old saved poses is there too, the Motions and Animation tabs have had some improvements too, their lists will now properly show a scrollbar when really needed. Bone rotations should be properly interpolated now and shouldn't interpolate for too long for a snappier feeling.
Besides the poser getting some much needed extra love there are some changes all over the place, changelogs for instance are now hidden by default so you can enjoy the login video on your first start and the Avatar Render Settings tab has had some improvements too, you can now select multiple people and change all of their render settings at once via the new options menu button at the bottom right. Mass changing hurray!
I'm really sorry this update took so long. Viewer development should be back on track now and better than ever! However there's still one last thing to do very soon. Burn down my current Windows installation and do a clean new Windows installation, install all the necessary stuff to compile the Viewer and have a fresh, faster and better Windows than ever.
I'd like to use this chance to remind you that there exists a Discord Server where you can get help and share pictures. Quite some people have been sharing really nice pictures so far! Which reminds me, i made some more too.
