Searching for the update...
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So with over half a month delay (i'm so sorry about that), i can finally present something thats worthwhile showing and this update comes with a huge bunch of changes.
Let's start with the cat in the sack. Profiles! LL announced that legacy profiles would come back and their project viewer has been released, i grabbed it immediately and got to working on it... or more like reworking pretty much most of it. It all started with the simple desire to change the layout... because that's what i love doing right? Changing layouts, making everything look fancy... i open the profile file and... its empty... mostly... just file references to other files... at this point it already dawned upon me whats going on here. The bane of my XUI designer existance... file references to other files, panel injectors, everything split everywhere... total chaos.
Here's the original layout... it looks meh, wastes space and looks... "Firestormy"... well its coming from Firestorm, they commited their profiles to LL so we were going to get a 1:1 port of their profiles. If you know me you know that i can't stand this. What started as simply just redoing the layout ended up in taking the ENTIRE profile code apart, reworking large parts of it and re-implementing everything carefully piece by piece, 9 days... wake up, work on profiles, squeeze real life and some games inbetwen, go to bed, every goddamn day. It was a massive mess, bloated with trash, unnecessary code (and it still is, there's still much to optimize) and generally stupid stuff all over the place. Look i may not be a coding professional, i may not be a coder at all but even my baby code is still more organized, simpler, faster and not as much of a headache than this mess. Maybe my code looks like its written by someone whose first day of coding just began and doesn't want to fuck it up so you write everything super simple and straighforward but at least its not a complete dumpster fire, its simple and gets its job done (mostly because i dont know any super professional hacky stuff so i have to resort to stupidly simple things that look noobish)... but damn BURN IN HELL PROFILE... nightmares incoming. Anyway... said and done, its all smashed together, unified and should work without any dirty hacks, most important of all its smaller now, both code and XUI files.
Here's the new layout, it does the ziczacdigiridooimageparsingslurlthingy and everything. Great. If you find any issues please report them, i'll go for a second pass to finetune everything a bit and fix any issues that come up, provided i can reproduce them and find out why they are happening. Technically everything should work tho, i got my profile wiped when i fucked everything up so it was a nice first test to see if stuff is working, it should. Please be aware that currently your image parses get deleted when you click OK, so if you have any icons parsed (like i did previously or like Blizzard has on the picture) make sure you are aware of this issue, it will be fixed along with everything else that comes up.
Next up... Firestorm's preferences/menu search. Same story as above, it's a mess, i reworked it for 3 days straight and fixed a few... ugly things on the way too. Note that the functionality comes from Firestorm (who commited this also to LL, both the profiles and search are now official), i merely made it less stupid and eye-cancer inducing.
Yay... you can now... search things... i guess for all those who need it.
A lot of under the hood work has been done too, cleaning up, more microoptimizations here and there, some experiments amd a few changes here and there, for instance the "Search Bar" is back in the navigation bar... no idea why it vanished in the first place but its back! Hurray!
One other fix worth mentioning.. it was reported that rigged mesh doesn't cast shadows when certain conditions are met, namely when the object had a single face that had a RGBA texture (a texture with alpha channel) flagging the entire object as alpha blending while the rest was actually flagging the object as masking, this caused the object to be falsely flagged as masking and blending at the same time, driving it into an edge case where it would always skip casting shadows. Needless to say no more!
Another experimental feature that im working on is the ability to load presets from other Viewers... it is in for now but cannot be disabled, if you got Firestorm installed in its default directory (C:/Program Files/) you'll now be able to load all its presets from the sky/water/windlight editor... be aware that opening the window now caused the Viewer to freeze for up to a few seconds due to the massive amount of presets being loaded, its only on open tho, i'll add options to toggle it off later and maybe find a better way to organize them, for now you'll just find all of them mixed in with yours, yay, chaos!
Aside from those big changes theres a huge amount of small changes coming from LL, all the latest changes and fixes have been merged, lots of crashfixes, bugfixes, refactors and so on, most importantly for those of you using the latest Windows 10 update however (1903) should now no longer see their colors getting corrupted on exiting the Viewer. Great. TOOK YOU LONG ENOUGH NIRAN I THOUGHT MY GPU WAS DYING.
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Here's a little bonus, one of my fruitless attempts at always-on headtracking.
In this new release, the windlight selection list (sky presets) only shows the default entries from the Black Dragon installation. My own windlights, which are all stored under %appdata%\BlackDragon\user_settings\windlight\skies, are no longer visible in the viewer. Please try to fix it or describe a workaround how I can select my own sky and water settings again.
ReplyDeleteAnd one more question: The new search in the preferences window finds the right tab and highlights the searched option, but the scrollbar does not scroll to the corresponding position. Bug or feature?
The windlight thing is fixed, expect an update very soon.
Deletecool can't wait to try it out . I have noticed on 'busy' sims - those with tons of mesh objects or tons of alpha stuff loading on the BD is next to impossible:( it just takes forever (even if at all) I also ran into an issue while making a video i had to max out the object detail slider as some mesh objects on a sim would not appear, and even then, a couple of items just never appeared (all worked fine in FS) But in anycase, the viewer looks great and i LOVE the poser! I made this video on BD and no post color correcting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmEhPrLtZbk&t=83s
ReplyDeleteObjects are not shown if their object surface is more than 200m², you might want to see if that setting makes a difference, its in place to prevent graphics crashers.
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