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, August 29, 2018

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.2.4 "Caring Dragon"

Quick! Take this release and run.

RUN! RUN BEFORE THIS MANIAC DECIDES TO CHANGE MORE THINGS AND EVERYTHING BREAKS AGAIN! RUUUUUUUUUUUUN!



This update took way longer than i wanted. Games kept sidetracking me, friends kept sidetracking me, family kept sidetracking me, then cool new stuff happened and it needed fixing then i wanted to pack up and just do this very tiny little change to top it off and everything broke... and this went on and on...but finally, here it is, in all its broken glory!

The main topic of this update was UI IMPROVEMENTS.

You'll find (but not notice) that the UI learned a few new handy tricks so let me give you a quick rundown what is new.

  • Right Clicking while dragging a slider will "cancel" out of the drag.
  • Right Clicking on a slider will revert it to its previous value if it had one.
  • Right Clicking on a slider, spinner, button or checkbox while holding CTRL and Shift will revert it to its default value IF it is linked to a debug setting.
  • Using the Scrollwheel while holding CTRL while hovering over a slider or spinner allows "scrolling" through values.
  • Holding Shift in addition to the above will scroll faster (times ten).
  • Clicking anywhere near the slider thumb will now center the mouse on it rather than instantly snapping the thumb to the mouse and changing the value, possibly causing a lot of hair-pulling. (Yup that's why i'm a naked dragon)
  • Pressing up or down arrow while a slider is selected now allows changing its increment value up and down respectively. There is currently no display to show you what it currently is set to.
  • Tools Floater - Texture tab sliders will now delay applying their value to prevent them from jittering all over the place because they constantly get resynced with the server and possibly ending up not the value you last set them to (e.g reverting back to previous values). This is not a perfect fix but it will massively reduce the hammering on the server when changing values and will combat this laggy behavior pretty good.

These are just the general UI widget additions. There's more! Loadingscreen has 2 new tips to mention two of the above new features too.

Both derender in nearby and adding friends is now multi-select, you can now mass invite everyone as friend....or mass derender everyone, the choice is yours.

"Show Original" in appearance will finally switch your inventory tab back to the main tab when it has to making it actually 200% more useful.

Some warnings to several options like the pie menu (action wheel), custom ports and others have been added to inform the user that using these will cause issues.

Lots of cleanup, layout consistency fixes, padding fixes, icon changes, scaling fixes and generally a lot of facelifting has been done across several panels all over the UI to ensure a more consistent look where i touched the UI.

HUDs taking control over the camera should now work properly again.

3 new people have been added to the Patreon list, thanks Nyt, Luke and Menominum!

The layout of the texture console has been overhauled again completely, wider bars, better spacing, consistency, consistency and more consistency, you can actually fucking look at it again and read it!


But wait, that's not all! The Viewer has been updated with the very latest code from LL and has had the maintenance fixes applied too, this includes a fix for rigged alpha masked/blending mesh shadows being rendered wrong, i waited years for them to fix it and here it is, FINALLY! The ONA Sergal finally looks as good as it was supposed to long ago!


Here's an example of the issue i reported over 4 years ago! Here is the original Jira


What a time to be alive!



via Gfycat

It's not over yet. I did change a few things on this blog as well, firstly and most importantly i added the bug tracker, you can see what i'm working on, which bugs i'm aware of, what features i have planned and which are already done/fixed. You can find it in the right sidebar. Further i changed the pre-download page to link the all "Guide" posts I've written, they are most likely more useful than the old posts i had linked there.

I've also separated the picture channel in Discord to differentiate between photo-shopped pictures and raw pictures, this is an effort to maybe feature unedited, raw pictures of users other than me on my blog. I stand for unedited pictures with my name and Viewer and i don't tolerate photo-shopped pictures ESPECIALLY not as promotion material for my Viewer, people are meant to see what the Viewer is truly capable of, now what you can do in Photoshop. I highly recommend taking a look at the pictures channel in my Discord Server, there are some truly awesome shots in there!

Also i'd like to thank all Patreon patrons again for their support, you rock!

One last thing, this update contains a bug that will sometimes render one ore more rigged attachments of other people on your HUD usually just until they are fully loaded, so far its rare and i don't know if its just me, so if you see it, DO REPORT it to me... i mean i'll investigate it regardless but just so you know i'm aware of it, if nothing helps do a relog but usually it should solve itself after a bit.

As always, report issues if you find them, i'll investigate them as soon as i can.

(Also WOW, dem downloads)


Enjoy some pictures, see you next time hopefully with pictures from others too!



Saturday, August 4, 2018

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.2.3 "Caring Dragon"

Another update, a bit later than i wanted but it contains some extra to make up for it.


It's mostly fixes again to work down my long list of todo's which seemingly gets longer every day rather than shorter.

Besides fixing the broken group chat behavior options, a crash when trying to toggle borderless window mode off while in login screen, enter key not working properly in keybinding dialogs among some other minor things this update comes with a revamped Media-on-a-Prim floater.


Also new are buttons to invert values easily, they have been added to the flycam configuration window as seen below:


I've also added a button to lock an array of sliders and move all sliders at once. You'll find these lock buttons in preferences - display mainly, it allows locking shadow resolution for instance and changing all shadow resolutions at the same time if that's your thing. It's really just a tiny QoL thing.

This update also brings the Viewer up to snuff with the latest LL Release, meaning snapshot saving is now multithreaded too among some other things, no more freezing SL while you are choosing a folder to save your snapshots in. In the future i'll use it for my animation window too.

If something is unexpectedly broken, report it to me, this version is almost untested besides a quick snapshot test to make sure LL's snapshot changes didn't break the most important feature of my Viewer.