Black Dragon Viewer: November 2020

It's update o' clock.

So after joy that the update is out and lots of bugfixes came in for all the reported issues, disenchantment sets in. Didn't take long for the first issues to appear (again). I THOUGHT i could leave out the VCRedist packages this time but it took what felt like not even 5 minutes before the first "the Viewer doesn't start" reports pop up. So today i decided to pull the first lever on stopping this madness once and for all. Starting from today this is the last update that i will attempt to leave out the redist packages. I honestly don't care if it scares people off or confuses them, i'd rather have them repair vcredist every single time they update the Viewer than more people just waiting in the corner for me to announce a new update just to be smacked down with a baseball bat with MSCVR120.dll or MSCVP120.dll/MSCVP140.dll missing written on it. I'm sorry but i'm getting incredibly sick of hearing it every day over and over when this problem is literally the very first answered question in the FAQ section, it's there because of just that.

I used the chance to set up the Discord server to no longer give access to everyone willy nilly. Everyone, including those already on it will have to start at the welcome channel, read it carefully, which tells them exactly how to unlock the rest of the server, it also tells them to read the FAQ. If this doesn't stop it then idk. Also the picture channels are separate and need to be unlocked with a reaction as well, i did this not only because i've seen questions come up whether to post a certain thing in X channel but also to bring some organization and management into these channels, you will no longer see the channel that contains giant oversized floppy ding dongs if you don't want to. With Discord now set up like that and people now being funneled through the welcome and FAQ area i hope that the amount of "i cant start the viewer" reports drastically reduce to a point where they become a myth.

Now let's get to the update itself. As mentioned above, it's a bugfix update, fixing all the reported issues minus one that i did not classify as bug but rather intended behavior.

Bugfixes include Depth of Field working underwater again (as well as a new option to toggle DoF in edit mode), the FPS limiter which was actually a bug (yes, the FPS limiter was a BUG) has been "unfixed" eh i mean broken again, changing shadow resolution should no longer cause a massive increase in VRAM usage compared to the first time shadows are initialized (when ticking Deferred), the daycycle editor should no longer (hopefully) crash and present an empty slider when opening with an invalid daycycle, Places - Landmarks should no longer jump around crazily when clicking into the window, enabling IMs to offline mail should work again, sound and streams should work again, fast timers view should work again and the different location buttons for cache, logs and chatlogs should now properly disable/enable depending on whether you are on the login screen or actually inworld.

As announced last update, i did improve the new complexity performance report. I've vastly extended and organized the layout, it will now show all information a lot more clearly and also has a few hints now what's what and what you can do to improve each and every performance group. It also shows some interesting tidbits if available such as a mention that projector lights are technically unlimited but shadows aren't. A few values also have changed and the way the display works has too. Since the "maximum" values are not really maximum values, i've made the color reflect that and instead made them recommendations, which looks like this:

So rather than confusing the user with an artificial "maximum" it now clearly states that it is simply recommended to stay below a certain point. Reaching this point also no longer immediately results in the "super bad" red rating but rather gives you the "eh" yellow/orange rating, see it as warning. As before you get a summary of all ratings together, right now its still very simple but i might actually add a 3-point answer that takes the 3 worst offenders and gives you hints and possibly even guides (or links to those) how to solve these.

Also, for the laughs, i want to share with you what i encountered while working on this.

And the first string attempts weren't exactly... good either... *caugh*

I kinda liked how the Viewer screamed at me, wanting me to be its slave to calculate PI but i figured that might have been a bit too much. Oh well.

Last but not least addition to the Viewer is the inclusion of roughness into SSR (again). It's toggeable too. You can find it with the rest of the SSR options but note that it has a big GPU impact. It's what i removed to make SSR run decent, if you enable it you better have a good GPU or you'll see your frames drop like dead flies. It looks nice though... i guess.