Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.1.3 "Selective Dragon"

Another update, almost a month later.

I'm sorry this is taking so long lately, updates start out small and then something new happens and it carries me away completely. This time i just wanted to merge the latest LL code but found an interesting changes so i dug deeper and started playing with selection outlines which led me to make several doing this and testing a bit around took me a week alone.


So lets get right into the meat of this update.

First and foremost the biggest change you'll see is when you start selecting something, whether it is just right clicking something or opening edit/build and having a selection up, you'll most likely come across a mesh you'll select and you'll notice that the selection now looks completely different. With the latest code merges LL changed them because it was hard to work on alpha surfaces with media prims or something like that. I found this change very interesting and explored a few... alternatives on its look. I made 5 presets to choose from, Black Dragon being the new default.

Beacon of Light

Black Dragon

Wireframe

Dots

Linden Labs Default

Furthermore i found the culprit of the massive framerate drops when selecting something... especially Maitreya and Belleza bodies. The Viewer updates the selection transformations as fast as it can resulting in massive lag when unoptimized bodies such as Belleza come up with 1.7 million polygons. To lessen the impact i reduced the update interval to 5 seconds and added an option to toggle it off completely, you'll see selection outlines becoming desynced from the bodypart when they move, mostly when selecting other people's stuff, it should be fine on yourself though as your avatar stops dead in its tracks the moment you select yourself. I recommend keeping the updates on unless you are fine with selection outlines not matching up with rigged mesh. This improves performance infinitely. An example: with default as-fast-as-possible update rate i get ~0.2fps when selecting Belleza, with the new 5 second interval i get 8 fps with a 2-3 sec freeze every 5 seconds, with updates disabled i get the full 8 fps without freeze. That's a massive improvement. Here's an example on my Avatar.

Notice how selecting my avatar doesn't have a big impact on my framerate.

Then, with the help of one of my users as well as the working shader error messaging now i could find out which shader is preventing Intel GPU users from enabling Deferred Rendering. The faulty shader has been fixed and all limitations in the preferences panel have been lifted you should now be able to run the full feature palette Black Dragon has to offer, regardless of your GPU. HOOORAY!

The poser has gotten some improvements as well, mostly code improvements, performance improvements and cleanup, ontop of that it now has icons and folders to "group" and categorize bones into sections, this is to help people get an idea what joint/body part this weird name might be you're currently trying to edit. Tell me what you think.

The complexity window has gotten some major fixes, double clicking attachments in the list now selects them, this goes very well with the new improved selection outlines and performance improvements, triangle and vertice counts as well as the complexity numbers will no longer become unreadable when they go too high either, finally you can read that your 5 quadrillion polygons properly.

Lastly i want to mention an issue with pie menus that made them hard to use when using any other UI size than 1.0, this should be fixed now too.