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.

Monday, December 3, 2018

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.3.5 "Notifying Dragon"

Phew this took a bit longer, stuff kept breaking.


preeeeetty much.


Anyway, to make it up this update comes with some big changes, at least in code they are.

First and foremost, to improve the user experience and help the user get an idea what's going on and which options they should touch with care i've built on top of the already present warning system and added notifications to some options. Notifications that will trigger when you enable certain options or set some others too high.

An example of changing the UI Size:


An example of setting shadow resolution too high:


An example of enabling your beloved Pie Menu:



As you can see they have a clear layout and immediately draw your attention (literally because they are taking focus). They will nicely inform you of your possible wrongdoings and give you some information as to why, some of them are mutable some of them are not, checkbox options and UI size are not because it is imperative to remind the user that these are EVIL options... and because you're most likely only ever gonna see them once or twice anyway.

I'm sure they'll be helpful in the future. This feature alone probably took half the time... because it kept breaking randomly.

Next up, something i've had on my ToDo list: Custom Camera Presets!

Have you ever wanted to simply make a new one rather than editing the already present ones? Do you want to not only create one... or two... but 200? Well now you can! You can create and edit as many as the Viewer can possibly load into a list before crashing, so a lot!

This feature comes prepacked with all the old presets as well as a new front preset some asked for, it also revamps the camera window slightly and shrinks down the Camera preferences tab a lot and condenses all the many preset slider pairs into just one used to edit the currently selected one. You'll find buttons to create a new one, delete the selected one and reset the selected one as well as a dropdown menu to select which one you want, selecting one will also automatically switch to that preset so you can immediately start editing it and see the changes live! So much Quality-of-Life. (All of it pretty much sucked up 90% of the time spending on this, besides fixing).


Note that this is a highly experimental feature though, i've spent a great deal fixing everything i could find and making it as easy to use as possible while retaining as much of the old look as possible. If you find any bugs with it, report them ASAP. We're talking about the camera here, it's critical and needs immediate fixing, don't come to me 3 years after that something is not right about it!

Next up, complexity or ARC. I further "refined" it. Media surfaces will now weight ten times more than before to get them on the complexity value where they roughly should, 10k for such a huge impact was way too little. Projectors have gotten a 4 times increase too, from 4k to 16k. Lastly texture memory has been updated and raised a lot, texture memory sucking avatars behold, you'll now be spammed back with complexity points! As a rule of thumb 1MB texture memory equals to 1k complexity. A 512x texture is ~1k, 1024x texture is 4k, not counting alpha channels. I've raised the default complexity limit to 250k to compensate for this.


Apart from these 3 big changes i've spend some time improving the details and workflow of some parts of the UI, keybinding now allows you to set the action when binding rather than having to select one before trying to add a new bind, this should make it easier to understand what the Viewer wants.

Poser lists have been made unsortable so you don't accidentally break things, the poser has gotten a few fixes too and the windlight editor now allows adding infinite cloud noise textures, it will refresh and show the new ones whenever you reopen the sky editor, just copy them into the correct folder and reopen the window.

Machinima sidebar has gotten the missing Global Light Strength option, log spamming has been reduced by a lot and lots and lots of commenting and cleanup in my code.

Last but not least, several new Patreon Patrons have been added and once again many thanks to everyone who helped so far and continues to help!

By TheScoutExe
By TheScoutExe

2 comments:

  1. So this is a long time off request from left field that may not even get looked at for months, but I must ask. Is there a plan to update RLV/a in the future to a stable version that is current, be it RLVa or the original spec RLV?

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    1. It is planned at some point yes. Getting the Viewer into its best shape is priority currently though. Updating RLVa will be a long, annoying and painful amount of work, so i'd rather just do it later when development has cooled down a bit, probably after EEP and when RLVa has been updated for it.

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