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, September 30, 2019

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.6.3 "Baking Dragon"

The sloppy update.


I suppose this is how it feels having to wait ages for an update.


This update comes with a bunch of fixes and some cool new stuff. First off several issues that were reported have been fixed (there are still more on my list but need some deeper investigation), picks will no longer instantly delete their description when you create them and click into their description box after hitting save, headtracking options have been reduced to sane defaults especially eyes were notorious for rolling back into your head... creepy... graphic presets can now be deleted if they contain spaces but please note that this is not retroactive and will not allow you to delete already saved presets that contain spaces (due to naming differences)and a crash was fixed that could randomly occour when a bad number of faces has been received.

This version also comes with the latest Linden changes including a few highlights such as increasing the maximum sound file length to 30 seconds, animesh selection improvements, worn items can now be copied and a lot of fixes all over the place.

Most interesting however are the new additions in this release...

From now on by default (currently not an option) your headtracking animation will blend ontop of all your animations, this means when moving your mouse on screen, focusing on things or generally doing something that would make your head move, it will now do regardless of you using an AO. It will not however simply override your head and neck but instead blend in addition to the underlying animation, this means that if your AO makes you look down at your feet you can "alter" the look direction a bit by moving your mouse around, your head will still mostly look down but you can notch it around a bit. This works with all animations, all AO's and everything ever even while running you can now look around, crazy isn't it? Over are the times of your lifeless head staring straight forward at all times. In the future this might get an option to toggle it off for now however you can customize it with the already existing head/eyetracking options, they control how much your head is allowed to move additionally. Note that this is a completely seperate thing from all your animations, the headtracking animation has absolutely no access to the underlying animations and thus cannot check how far your animations rotated the head to prevent it from breaking your neck... e.g if your AO makes you look 90° to the right and you make it look 90° more degree to the right you'll end up looking backwards.... ouch... this should however rarely happen. Here's a video of the whole thing in action.



Don't worry, i know some of you will want my head on a plate for doing this. Do you want a silverplate or is a normal one sufficient?

But there's more. I've finally gotten around to do my super simple but quite efficient own way of aligning toolbars, no hacks no dirty tricks no sophisticated bullshit just very simple magic and it works really good too. You can now finally align the toolbar buttons to the sides, top and bottom can be moved left and right and left and right toolbars can be moved up and down. I guess you'll make some quite interesting setups with this. Something like this:


Note that these require you to redo your buttons completely, you will end up with an empty toolbar. You can do so by opening the toolbar editing window (Ctrl + Alt + B or via menu from Dragon - Edit - Toolbars)

Other than that there have been some changes to the left/right shoulder cam so it behaves and swings around like all other camera presets, fixes for crashes in the fast timer display, as well as fixes for cutoff labels, window transparency default buttons not working and more attempts to reduce costly calls to settings.

I've some cool things planned for the future, a proper "changelog" window that shows all changes between the version you last run and the new version you installed, as well as a window that gives you access to all machinima related options (outside of the Dragon menu), a window that shows all light and projector sources to quickly toggle them on/off, the option to rotate water (yes you heard that right), a tutorial and more help with options and more.

As always if you find something that isn't working, report it to me ASAP and i'll look into it.

By Ella
By Aeekay
By Spiritus

Thursday, September 5, 2019

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.6.2 "Baking Dragon"

More Viewer care and feeding...

that dragon must be really fat now...



Only contains a bugfix for presets not being saveable. It turns out the Viewer can't create a folder inside a not yet existing folder, it has to create said top folder first, then create the sub folder. What do we live in, 1802? We're doing raytracing bullshit and can't even create a goddamn folder structure automatically.

By Kissmebaby Allen


Wednesday, September 4, 2019

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.6.1 "Baking Dragon"

Viewer care and feeding update.


Bugfixes as always.

I was sick of the old graphics preset system LL made so i made a new one from scratch, much simpler and with more control over what settings should be saved and when, i plan on using this in the future for a "backup" feature. Also the checkboxes finally tick now when a preset is selected! (that was actually the reason i did this new preset system)

The new preset system also means your old presets are now useless, sorry for the inconvenience, you could message me on discord and i can modify them for you to work when i get some time.

Aside from that more tiny optimizations and a fix for high res snapshots breaking (sorry about that).

By Loverdag
By Eros