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.

Friday, January 25, 2019

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.4.1 "Exploding Dragon"

This one's a big one. Lots of fanciness included!




Let's start with the additions.

The double-click behavior on inventory items and avatars in "People" can now be changed, there are multiple options. Teleport to is NOT an option.



Shadow occlusion has been brought back, no idea if it actually improves shadow rendering performance but we'll see.


The changes...

Keybindings has been reworked (again) to hopefully make it much easier to rebind keys and see what you are supposed to do, no more 5 lists, no more selecting an action first, the new way is much simpler. You select the keybindings you want to see -> First Person , Third Person and so on, you hit "Add" and get the add dialog in which you can select the action you want to add and press the keys you want to assign, very simple.



Font shadowing has been enabled for most if not almost all texts in the UI, you'll notice that the text will look different than before, that's because it will now have a soft black shadow around it, making it a bit easier to distinguish from the background and making background such as in the Login panel changelog obsolete. It also looks cool at no perceived additional performance cost so far. Nice!



While we are at performance, i've undone a small cleanup from the last update that seems to have introduced a loss in performance, i hope this is fixed now.

I've also spend some time optimizing the preferences window again, improving its opening performance by a lot, no more freezes on opening it except when opening the Avatar Render Settings tab for the very first time. It should also run a tad bit faster while open, less slowdown whooohooo!

Also, while we are at Avatar Render Settings, the right-click menu entry "Exceptions..." didn't work, i fixed that, it should now open the preferences window and select the Avatar Render Settings tab.

Furthermore i spend a huge amount of time this update going through many windows and panels, fixing the tabs, fixing the layout, making everything as consistent as possible and generally just making everything look nice and fancy. You'll notice the preferences window has gotten a bit fancier and all tabs in several windows have had their widths increased to properly fill the entire container all the way to the end, so nice and clean.



Have you ever noticed how selecting high poly avatars in other Viewers has absolutely murdered your framerate? Did you also notice how this was not the case in Black Dragon? Well i did some.. tweaks in the past to stop the selection outline from updating every frame but this had the side effect that the selection outline became instantly out-of-sync when the item in question was rigged and moved, it also made selecting parts a hassle because the outline took 5 seconds to show up (and update) if the update was enabled, otherwise it might have never showed up at all. Well not anymore! I've reworked this part too, the selection outline will once again update as fast as possible, every frame, but it will require VASTLY less performance to do so now, it will still take a huge chunk of your framerate if you select Maitreya or Belleza bodies but it should no longer drop you into completely unusable 1-3 fps or worse, 10-20 FPS while having them selected should be easily possible now, given you have 20-30 FPS to begin with of course. As test i've selected a jacked that had 1 million polygons, it only dropped me to around 6 FPS (from 30 thanks to the overly complex avatar itself), previously that would have made me freeze for several seconds and most likely not allow me to get more than 1 FPS... or more likely would have simply crashed me. Having one million polygons selected and update in realtime is a bitch but its our bitch now! *whipcracking*



Haha ohyea and before i forget, the mesh outlines (and all their styles you can select) are now used for all object types, not just mesh. How awesome is that!? Screw those old shitty laggy crap glowy outline thingies, you can now have the new ones!

Also premium users should now hopefully see their premium max group number correctly, previously it was showing the default 42 at all times.

I've also changed a few option labels to better describe what they do and look less like leftovers from previous preferences versions.

And finally, i've merged the latest code from Linden Labs getting the Viewer up on par with 6.0.1. It contained some crash fixes, translation stuff (which i don't use) and a few other smaller bugfixes such as jellydolls still emitting light.

By JDB
By JDB
By Loverdag


Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.3.9 "Exploding Dragon"

Happy New Year everyone.

I hope you got a better start into 2019 than i did.

2018 was a trainwreck and the last week just now was equivalent of a nuclear chainreaction. Everything went haywire, one catastrophic event followed the next. To some degree this feels like 2011-2012 all over again, an emotional rollercoaster full of shit and even bigger shit.

I don't feel like writing much about this update, its just some bugfixes, some tidying up the UI and slight improvements here and there. If you find anything, report it as usual.

by Beev Fallen

I'm signing off for a while.