Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.2.5 "Caring Dragon"

After last update's uproar about UI changes i thought i'd do something different this time around.

JK

This is another UI update.

But rather than listing everything i've done i'll just give you a few pictures and get onto the rest after that.

New online/offline notification look

Snapshot window shows the save path

Fancier voice volume popups

Lots of other stupid stuff you'll yell at me for, like fixed readability in text editors (specifically About Land and Landmark editing), some text changes and little cleanups here and there.

What is much more important however is the new Automatic Memory Management which by default is enabled, i want you to test it out and give me some feedback. What it does: It checks how much memory is used for Scene/System memory and automatically sets the limit for them as high as needed + some extra, meaning whenever you need more it will automatically set the limit higher and will also lower it again when you need less. This should reduce any performance impact large memory limits have to a minimum (if they still have one like they had before 64bit). I've also used this chance to make a few experimental changes to allow setting the limits up to 3984mb, making a total of roughly 8gb to be used. I'm sure you'll never hit these (you'll have a hard time hitting 2gb even). All i can say is i had to enable Full Resolution Textures to fill my whole 6gb of VRAM, without crashing or slowing down that is. You wanted more memory usable in SL? You got it. You can disable the automatic management if you think it's causing you issues or if you want to do it manually. Just note that on AMD it knows no limits, i still cannot read AMD GPU memory values so i can't find out how much VRAM your GPU has and thus cannot limit it accordingly, be mindful of that.

Another very controversial change is complexity. Yup i changed it again, i dropped the "divide by 10 to make numbers readable" and dropped the impact of simple polygons but raised the impact of rigged mesh. You'll see higher numbers for sure, my own av complexities roughly doubled but altogether you'll most likely see most people getting jellydolled anyway so not much change here, you might just have to adjust your max complexity a bit up. I raised the default from 125k to 150k, measuring against my own avatars (50k-110k) this seems like a good number for near perfectly optimized all the way down to slightly above "okayish" without letting in the "okayish" and below avatars. I'll keep an eye on complexity, i'll probably readjust it again, probably lower the impact if simple triangles a bit more to crunch big numbers a bit more down but besides big numbers it seems to do it's job well at jellydolling avatars i really don't want to waste my resources on. I also did some fixing to the calculations so the one in the complexity floater and the inworld display match and both count everything properly... inworld display didn't count the root prim's triangles for instance (ouch), so expect to see even higher triangle counts now.

Knotty Beach really isn't a good place to show complexity but you'll see what i mean with huge triangle counts, people there are the worst. Red numbers everywhere and triangle counts starting at the range of entire levels + NPC's in triple A titles. The whole scene was ~20 million triangles, that's simply insane.

Before i'll leave you with this new update, there's a new slider to control the global brightness of all light sources in the world.

And now, the first ever pictures on my blog from other people. These are coming straight from the Black Dragon Discord channel.

By SpiritusNatus

By Beev Fallen

By SpiritusNatus