Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.8.10 "Enhancing Dragon"

 The TLC (Tender, Love & Care) DLC (only 9.99$)

What, it's already a month again? Jesus, i did lose track of time there. Well this update is jampacked with fixes and improvements! I did try to get some experimental things in but... well they turned out too big for what's supposed to be a bugfix/improvement update. This update also doesn't come with the initially planned LL code update. The one i merged forced me to go to Visual Studio 2017 and rather than the expected performance improvements that usually comes with updated tools ... it was a disastrous massive performance drop, one i simply cannot accept after EEP already eating a good chunk of FPS.

The update comes with lots of other improvements anyway! So let's see what this update contains.

Let's start with the UI changes. I've gone through all preferences tooltips and improved them, i made tooltips support linebreaking so i could organize them better, the new tooltips look much better, cleaner and generally offer some extra information in comparison to the old ones!

This should make reading them and getting information needed from them much easier. In the same vein of improving readability i also changed the color picker alpha texture, now its a diagonal slice which work regardless of the color display shape. This is now used in the Edit window to show transparency.

While readability is all nice n dandy i've also improved the usability of several things a good chunk. Starting with sliders which have been quite an annoyance for a long time due to their... erratic and unprecise handling, especially since the Viewer uses them a lot. Sliders will no longer immediately change their values when click-dragging the thumb, they will now only change their value if you actually move your mouse. On top of that you can now type in ANY value into the text entry, regardless of what the slider allows in increments, min/max are obviously still capped but you can now type in 555 when the slider only goes in 1000 steps. Note that the slider itself will continue to go in 1000 steps, this ONLY works for typing into the text field.

While going through preferences i've also removed a couple broken options, and added several new things. You can now find seveal "open" buttons in Preferences - Viewer. These will open the cache, logs and viewer log file directories respectively, this should make it a lot easier to get to your settings, cache and viewer logs, especially for me since i don't have to explain you how to get there.

I've also added delete buttons as you can see, to clean your viewer logs, you should probably do that from time to time. Every week or so.

While doing a few rounds through the code i've also cleaned up some messes here and there, simplified some code parts and fixed a couple other issues. Mostly reported issues such as not being able to load and delete presets with a name exactly like a default preset. Doing so also magically fixed (it seems) the issue with name encoding. From what i've tested, it seems to be (once more) like it doesn't matter anymore what the name of your windlight presets is, encoded or not, or both. You should now be able to load them all again, if you still find one that's causing issues, please report it to me. With that the import function slowly loses usefulness but i've not forgotten about it, instead i've actually fixed it and it should again work, even better it now can import both new EEP and old Windlight presets (for whatever reason you'd want to import already imported EEP presets). I'm also thinking of doing a multi-import.... but maybe later.

Now the interesting bits about this update. Rendering. Quite a few of you probably noticed by now that something is... off with water reflections. They do not match up when rotating your camera and they do not reflect alpha masked objects. Well, needless to say they will now do exactly that! Screw dem bugs!

There's also a hidden little new feature, you can find it when previewing any animation. You'll find a slider there now that allows you to go through your animation and jump to any point in it, even in between keyframes! This is the very first step to an animator tool.

There are lots and lots more small improvements everywhere but they are far too insignificant and too many to list here. So i wont, but you can check out the changelog to see all of them.

Lastly, i'm aware that Bitbucket discontinued support for Mercurial Repositories, i didn't expect them to lock down the entire repository though, just delete the source or something. This means i have to move a lot of stuff, including some formal stuff for the TPVD inclusion to here unless that's not okay, in which case i'll have to seek out other places to put it. I'm sorry for the inconvenience this has caused regarding downloads, this is why i had to push the update today and get as many things done as possible in a short amount of time, so expect possibly broken things.

As always, thank you very much for your support although the patronage has been declining lately. If i missed anyone, please please please do tell me!

By CassandraMiddles

By KT Syakumi

By Kissmebaby Allen