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.

Sunday, March 3, 2019

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.4.2 "Exploding Dragon"

Whew. What do we got here? Is that an update in your pants or are you just happy to see me.


More than 1 month without an update, what have i done? Let's just say quite a bit.


Lets get started right away! We'll start with the cat in the bag: Performance! Don't you just hate when you optimize right-click selection outlines to the point you can actually have something selected without freezing to death and this stupid UI blows everything up and calls his children 560.000 times per frame? ME TOO! I know mothers become dragons when it's about the kids but boy this mom surely calls its children a lot of times, unnecessarily so, even worse, calling out for her kids this often annoyed the nice neighbor framerate so much that he couldn't do his work this resulted in a lot of stalls, unnecessary stalls in work. I took my chance and smacked a big fat patch across her big mouth, she should be quiet for a while. No more interruptions. No more stalls in work. If only working on the Viewer was this easy... oh i forgot, it is! That's why i did more! I didn't just fix 560.000 getChild calls per frame i also took the liberty to look around the UI and see what else is calling for its childs too often. You know, counting through all your 5 billion children is a bit slow, especially if you do it hundred thousand times a second but the UI does call its children quite a lot everywhere, not just when something is selected (for whatever reason), i went through right click menus, the main menu, object and avatar menus, some windows and the main UI as well as the main UI update cycles and drastically reduced the stalls everywhere. It feels so nice to open right click menus without stalls now. Not to mention left-clicking now doesn't stall the Viewer for a tiny itsy moment either. In general the overall performance should be much more stable and maybe even a tiny bitsy bit better. Most importantly though, constantly updating objects won't murder your framerate anymore when you keep them selected, wonderful.


So while going through everything due to the above... *ahem* performance issues, i also cleaned up some quite a few code parts and hopefully made them faster and safer, this includes iterating through attachments in the complexity window, the camera as well as the Viewer in general.

Then i spent a lot of time going through my to-do list, fixing as many issues as i could, adding some suggestions and improving on some others. Keybindings should no longer falsely default to "First Person" and show "Third Person". Attachment icon and text when creating group notes should finally show up and stay like they should...i added a warning to changing the Font DPI, improved consistency in multiple areas of the UI such as the Map and Tools window.


Mod/Copy/Trans permissions in inventory have been changed, they are now strikethrough, Deferred Rendering is now considered default on, Motion Blur was disabled by default, its options were slightly changed (you can now select whether to blur your own avatar, others or both in addition to objects), the balance display vanishing in some rare conditions was fixed and working with the glow and transparency sliders on objects should now be much smoother thanks to them not immediately spamming the server with changes and rather waiting for you to be done dragging the slider.



IM/Group sessions starting for you should hopefully no longer make you freeze for increasingly longer times (thanks to Drake for the fix), flycam rolling should work again when its bound to an axis rather than buttons and more...

..i fixed multiple crashes, one related to having a bigger Font DPI and opening certain windows, another when rendering lights.

Finally there are also new things in this update. You can now change the mouselook camera offset but beware, mouselook works different than the normal camera, changing anything but the height will do strange things. You can do some fun things with it tho.



But most importantly this update includes the very first draft of my new big feature i'll be working on after the Poser. You might remember the totally broken camera recorder window i added quite some time ago, i spent a few days to rework it and make it mostly fully functional, it's really hard to use and extremely meh at best still but its only the very very first working version and just like the Poser this will get constant updates, new features, improvements and so on. I've also chosen to leave the UI as is, as in it's complete shit, no thought and no effort put into it as special experiment so you can see how the UI looks when its just made functional and i haven't put my hands on it yet. I'm thinking of putting every UI overhaul into a separate tab so you can see the evolution (if there is any beyond the first rework) of the UI over the course of its development, i thought that might be a nice reminder of how much is actually going on behind curtains when it comes to working on the UI. You'll get a functional UI first, no fanciness, no consistency, no design, no nothing, pure UI functionality, then later you'll get the usual UI changes, then tell me again i don't put any thoughts into it.



Yeppers, that's the UI you see there, big, clunky, broken. Have fun with that.

And for the end, i saved the very best: WEBPROFILES WILL GO! GOODBYE WEBPROFILES!

No i didn't change my mind. This came right from LL! Soon webprofile feeds will break and then LL will bring back clientside profiles. Oh did i wait long for this... not because i don't like webprofiles, i liked them, i'm just happy to get a new window to trash and redo.

As always, if you find bugs or issues, report them to me (or on Discord), i'll hopefully get them worked out sooner or later.

by 털덩이

by Spiritus
by Spiritus
by Loverdag

No comments:

Post a Comment