Black Dragon 64x - Update 4.0.3 "Refreshing Dragon"

After a unusually long time its finally here! I'm really sorry it took this long there have been many road blockers for this release but i'll get into that later.

Let's go through what this update does first. First and foremost the biggest change in this update is bringing the Viewer a little up to date (upped 8 versions at the time). I was trying to bring it all the way up to the latest version but that ended up in the Viewer spectacularly breaking so i had to revert it all and restart the merging process. Even those 8 versions alone brought a lot of issues (but also a lot of changes and internal fixes) which had to be resolved first, most of which should be resolved hopefully.

But it isn't just fixing up the code merge it was also a chunk of bugs reported by users that have been fixed, since the list kept getting longer and longer and i only release when all of the known bugs are solved (those that can be solved short term) it took a bit to get the Viewer in good shape again. Then real life happened, those who follow Discord know about the lawsuit issues and finally (just recently) a massive amount of reports started rolling in about missing and vanishing objects, rezzing issues and the like all of which seemed to be related to 4.0.2. Sorting out whether this was an actual Viewer issue or not took some time, it is now however known that these issues are not related to the Viewer, they are happening for a lot of people regardless of Viewer and seem to be related to switching between Viewers, particularly rezzing something on Firestorm and then switching over to other Viewers. A good part of the issue was also a lot of people suddenly turning on "Fast Cache Fetch" and not realizing that this option causes similar faulty behavior, if you enabled said option, disable it ASAP and clear your cache, this option essentially corrupts your cache until you no longer see anything at all. Outside of said option there is a rampant (what seems server related) issue that is troubling rezzing right now. We will need to wait and see how it goes.

To the Viewer itself, which has gotten some fixes for some recently introduced issues as well as some really old ones too. One of those recent issues that cropped up is a crash when switching camera presets, another one would be zoom and up/down axis for controller freaking out, both of which have been resolved. The snapshot window has had its layout fixed so the JPEG quality slider is no longer hidden behind the save button and the selection outline styles "Linden" and "Wireframe" have been swapped as it seems more accurate that way around. Older issues... and i mean really old issues include rigged attachments not actually hiding themselves in mouselook when they are attached to the head, after all these years i've finally fixed this and even went one step further and added an experimental implementation of what VRChat does, scaling down your head bones while in mouselook, this will effectively eliminate your head in mouselook, no matter where it is attached, the results so far were good but we'll see how this fairs on humans. Another old issue i attempted fixing is the rare case an animation overwrites/stops the Poser, sadly i had to take this change back last second as it broke the Poser entirely but with the latest code also came another issue that essentially broke the Poser, killing its posing animation every time an avatar appearance update was sent, maybe this has been the issue all along, i can't tell, we will see whether this ever happens again.

Other miscellaneous fixes include some nametag clipping issues, glow settings in the machinima sidebar hiding (rather than just disabling) themselves and some cleanup and improvements all around the code.

This update also includes LL's own keybinding system which of course i had to completely ditch because i already have my own, i did however try to get mouse bindings in but currently only extra mouse buttons are bindable (left and right mouse are not), when i find a sensible way to bind them without accidents i'll enable left and right mouse as well, allowing you to bind them to walking forward, i'm sure a lot of people have waited for this becoming a feature for a while.

Last but not least i implemented a new very simple avatar performance ranking system very similar to that of VRChat. At first i went into detail like they do but i quickly had to realize that it will always end in absolutely everyone getting the worst rating at all times (which is to be expected because all avatars are absolutely horribly optimized)... which would make this ranking basically useless, instead i opted for something more simple based on complexity. It scales from 40.000 to 250.000 complexity and will tell you via icons on nametags how "complex" avatars are at a glance and which might be causing issues. It should be somewhat obvious but in case it isn't, a green star means excellent, green dot, yellow dot, red dot and finally red exclamation mark are the rankings from good to very poor.

Now let's get to the known issues, apart from the already mentioned rezzing issues i am aware of the Poser rarely stopping (again i've been trying to reproduce this but its so rare that it never happened for me and even if it did it would have to happen many times to give me some attempts at fixing it), binding left and right mouse are not possible yet and keybinding in general might break in some conditions... if that happens please report these issues in as much detail as possible..., deleting all notifications still sometimes saves all attachments to inventory... this one is extremely unrealiable to reproduce and there is no indication as to why its happening both BD and LL use the exact same code for the delete function and all they do is delete them, there is never ever a call that triggers an inventory offer or anything like that, i couldn't reproduce when i tried it. Fast Cache Fetch is causing trouble and i need to remove this option so people stop using it.

With all that being said let's get into the lawsuit thing. What happened has been previously already explained here on the blog in a previous post, now this all finally did a round trip and we got a warning that we haven't paid yet (paid what), until then we didn't even know how much to pay to whom yet, lucky for us our good old friend government was there to help (and warn us) that we only have to pay a measly 1500€, nothing too fancy, something anyone can easily pay with his change money. At the same time i was told that we still have an open payment of 6500€ for child money payback due to an issue with my brother not being properly signed off from working thus netting my mother child money for him when she shouldn't have. Panicked and absolutely defeated i asked around in Discord for a solution and some people suggested a GoFundMe campaign, having almost no options i opted to take said advice and open one up. This went on for a month until i collected enough money to pay off the 1500€ lawsuit, unknown to me that this had a timeframe of 2 weeks... not being able to pay it in time i was forced to pay another 500€ on top of that... which i luckily still had at hand thanks to saving up money in case anything bad would happen. This put a huge hole into my savings and effectively put me back to 0... if anything were to happen now i'm fucked. Luckily it seems that's it for now, at least for the lawsuit, i have absolutely no idea how we are going to pay the 6500€ but if anything happens i'll let you know. For anyone interested in helping the GoFundMe Campaign can be found here. It's sad to see i had to do this and i would rather not because i already feel bad about the Patreon thing but having to go for a GoFundMe in addition to that seems super scummy to me...

Steering away from overly sad news let's get back to something nicer. With coming updates i'll slowly bring the Viewer up on par to the latest LL code again, fixing all issues that arise on the way there and keep on (re)working the Viewer, there are a couple things that are now in dire need of changes, particularly the sidebar, the keybinding system and the nametags.

With that being said i wish you all a Merry Christmas and thank you very much for your support i'm sure this Viewer would be dead by now without your support!

By Loverdag

By Emelie Laks

By Emelie Laks

By Emelie Laks

And this one straight up blows my mind

By IzabellaMae

Black Dragon 64x - Update 4.0.2 "Refreshing Dragon"

 For anyone closely following the development either on Discord or watching the blog version number know that there have been 2 updates (4.0.1 and 4.0.2). I just didn't feel like writing something for them because they aren't exactly spectacular to talk about. They are just bugfix updates.

I've been bugsquashing to get the Viewer in a decent shape to... well break it again of course! Now that all the major issues are resolved i think its finally time to get the latest code again (and break absolutely everything i fixed in the process).

Apart from that not much has been done a couple highlights from the bugfix list would be the Poser finally being able to delete presets with special characters, an option to allow stretching the field of view in local snapshots too, the environment editor no longer deleting textures out of presets when you have the permissions, not binding roll or zoom on the controller no longer resulting in those breaking, a long standing issue being resolved with shadow softness at certain angles simply "snapping" to new values making the transition quite harsh and several options not working and warnings being incorrect. I'm sure you'll find a fix or two for your issue too, especially if you had weird things happening like being unable to see the edit arrows or buying/paying items.

As always, report any bugs you see so i can shoot them!

By Emeline Laks

By Kyosumari

By Olakota K. Nobre

By Emeline Laks

Black Dragon 64x - Update 4.0 "Refreshing Dragon"

Big big update time!

First and foremost, the most prominent change in this update you will see is the total overhaul of the Preferences -> Display tab. The goal here was to simplify the and reorganize all options to make it as easy for the user as and fast as possible for users to work with the options and get what they want while at the same time keeping a nice aesthetic and of course as much functionality as possible. The "Ticker" widgets are nothing new anymore because they were already introduced in 3.9.11 (sadly) despite being planned for 4.0 but they have now been applied to most settings that made sense using them for. Their goal is to make it easier for the user to know what they are doing, no one knows what Motion Blur Quality 90 meant, or did you? What about Terrain Texture Quality 5... or 10? Which one is better... 10? No. Some options work different, which is why numbers were simply confusing and that is exactly what these Tickers are supposed to address.

Several other windows has been tidied up and overhauled as well to give them some love that they really needed after all this time, the script (My Scripts and Region Memory) info windows have been overhauled and the My Scripts window in particular has been added because it was missing so far. The animation controls window has also been cleaned up a bit, relabeled some buttons and moved them around so they make more sense and a couple of other minor tweaks also went into Tools, the Script Editor as well as the Snapshot window.

Speaking of the Snapshot window, it has been cleaned up a bit (now that Emails are confirmed discontinued officially) and a couple of bugs have been fixed, Autoscale Rendering in particular should now work again and Remember Snapshot mode should now work again and persist across the entire session. In addition to that the custom snapshot resolution you set should now also save per session.

The last major UI change is removal of the Voice dot. It has been removed because it was known to impact performance heavily and i always found that it was either in the way or getting stuck inside the Avatar or behind your nametag. No more! The Voice dot is now part of the nametag and will currently only display whenever you are speaking, there is currently no indicator if someone has Voice or not but i'm going to change that in the next update. As an added little bonus, you will now also see a little donut icon above my head as indicator that i'm the developer, its super cute. The below image highlights very well why the old Voice dot was simply bad in comparison to the new voice indicator on your nametag.

Apart from some major UI overhaul that i've started with this update and are going to continue with the upcoming 4.0 based updates this update features many fixes for all the known and reported issues. This includes the Poser reverting your shape to the previous avatar when switching avatars while the Poser window is open, EEP presets reverting to the first one when opening another one while the Fixed Environment window is already open, Animeshes being counted as many times as they have sub parts, the Local tab being greyed out on ALL clothing items when editing wearable layers, double clicking them replacing previous layers (most noticeably with tattoo layers) and being unable to delete Camera presets if they contained a "-".

There have also been some additions that were requested such as being able to copy the Camera Recorder entries to clipboard, being able to bind a button to reset the camera roll while in flycam, being able to lock the camera position in place while moving around (requires you to zoom onto something and then you can move around without the camera snapping back) and the addition of a consistency change for all Appearance windows which now allows you to simply double click clothing pieces and attachments in your Outfits and Edit Outfit windows to simply detach or attach things, just like in your inventory.

As always, thanks to everyone who keeps supporting the Viewer, both past Patreon patrons, current patrons and non patrons.

I'd like to highlight this picture taken by Spiritus (Spectris Audax on Discord) who has been using the Viewer for a long time and has been posting pictures in the Discord server from time to time that have always showed some absolute fantastic detail and really made the Viewer and its features shine but these two pictures in particular have been absolutely the best overall i've seen so far out of all pictures.

What makes these two stand out so much is the incredible lighting that is achieved with projectors whereas the lighting in the scene is all static and baked. Overall this image is incredibly simple and yet so well executed that it might as well be the very best picture i have seen so far. No editing has been done on these, it is all in-Viewer and it looks absolutely amazing and all that without the use of extensive super flashy effects, there is very very little that could be improved here.

If i had to categorize the best pictures, this would definitely go into the best picture for straight up simple pictures. While i make flashy pictures with fancy features, Loverdag makes great landscape shots and Spiritus here very detailed Avatar focused shots. That does not mean there aren't more similarly talented people. KT Syakumi and Emelie Laks for instance, both whose pictures have been featured a couple times here already do make really great and artistic pictures too and there are even more! You should really check out the Discord server!

By Emelie Laks

By Emelie Laks

By Emelie Laks

By Navier

By Loverdag

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.9.11 "Visualizing Dragon"

 So as you may or may not have noticed there was another update. This one's an "emergency" update.

Vir contacted me that my Viewer is (once again) in violation of the TPV rules, this time due to the windlight/EEP settings being savable. Oof.

So what do i mean when i say savable, are we not allowed to save them anymore at all?  Well... so the thing is, what i did was keep the way we had it since Windlight, allow editing and saving Windlights we come across as local presets (and also additionally now as items), to prevent content theft i made it strip out the assets from the Windlight presets, this included all textures (sun/moon/clouds), if you didn't have the permissions to copy/trans them. Sounds good right? Nope, it's not enough. LL does not want you to save presets at ALL. If you go to any region and there is a region Windlight, you are NOT allowed to save it, no matter how much editing you do to it. This sucks and i've clearly voiced my opinion about this situation and what they call "intellectual property" on presets. I do NOT see a collection of values for what is literally just a graphics preset as an IP protected asset (same for shapes, but those have been like that since the beginning), LL sees this different apparently. So what i had to do now was remove saving them. You can still save presets both as item and locally but ONLY if you are not using the region Windlight (for instance you are using the default midday) or when using your own presets. Sure we all have a big collection of presets by now but it still sucks, knowing that all the work you've put into that preset cannot be saved just because it was initially based on a region Windlight is stupid... but to be expected from LL.

But the update is not just this one change (although i was initially thinking of just having this single change) it does include almost everything else that was in the current WIP build (just quickly finished up and hopefully fixed) since it wouldn't hurt to get some feedback on those changes as i'm now also aiming for a big UI overhaul in many parts of the UI, starting once again with preferences. You can find the new widgets in the display tab of preferences, essentially what these are is what every game nowadays employs, a dropdown with two arrows allowing direct cycling through all options and a graphical display below them that shows how many options there are in total and on which one you currently are. In addition they also highlight which ones are the default ultra setting and which ones are potentially dangerous, just like before. They save a massive amount of space and with the addition of dropdowns now being able to have tooltips for each individual entry, they also feature... well their tooltips too. I'd like to hear what you think about them. I really like them, gives everything a bit more modern feeling.

Other noteworthy changes are a couple bugs that were reported (not all of them yet) like the animations control window no longer doing a full nuclear stop all animations when clicking stop, but rather just stopping the currently selected animation (so you can test your animations easier without killing all your animations and potentially bugging them), search will no longer reset when you reopen it while its already open, projector shadow resolution didn't properly work anymore and some preferences warning not properly working or firing off too easy.

Everything else is currently WIP but for those following the Discord channel will know that more and more UI parts are coming up to be overhauled, those include the Flycam Configuration window, the script window, the Animation Controls window, the Machinima Sidebar and the animation upload windows.

As always stay safe and thank you everyone for your support! Keep reporting them buggies.

By Loverdag

By KT Syakumi

By Apollo Scribe

Black Dragon 64x - Update 6.9.420 "noϱɒɿႧ ϱnizilɒυƨiV"

.ƨɘoϱ Ɉi woʜ wonʞ υoY .Ɉ'nblυow i ϱniγɒƨ ɘɈiqƨɘb ,γɒboɈ ɘɈɒbqυ ɿɘʜɈonɒ bɘƨɒɘlɘɿ i bɘɔiɈon ɘvɒʜ γɒm υoγ ƨA

.0.ς mɿoɈƨɘɿiᆿ ɒ ƨiʜɈ ϱniʞɒm γlɘviɈɔɘʇʇɘ ɿɘwɘiV γɿɘvɘ ʇo ɘɿυɈɒɘʇ γɿɘvɘ ƨbbɒ ɘɈɒbqυ ƨiʜɈ ɈɒʜɈ ƨi ɈnɒɈɿoqmi ɘɿom ƨ'Ɉɒʜw Ɉυઘ

.ob i ƨɒ ʜɔυm ƨɒ Ɉi ɘʞil υoγ ɘqoʜ I .ƨɈnɒw ɿɘƨυ ɘʜɈ ɿɘvɘɈɒʜw ɘd nɒɔ ɿɘwɘiV ɘʜɈ bnɒ ɘɈɘloƨdo ɿɘqolɘvɘb ƨɒ ɘm ɘbɒm mɘɈƨγƨ ɔimɒnγb wɘn γm ƨɒ ɿɘvɘ ɿɘwɘiV ƨiʜɈ ɿoʇ ɘɈɒbqυ Ɉƨɒl γlυɿɈ ɘʜɈ ɘd lliw ƨiʜT

.ƨƨɘυϱ i ɿɘlioqƨ ƨqooʜw ...ƨɘY .٢ς0ς ni nwob ƨɈυʜƨ ⅃Ƨ Ɉnioq ɘʜɈ oɈ qυ ɘɿυɈυʇ ɘʜɈ ni ɘƨɒɘlɘɿ ɿɘvɘ lliw γɘʜɈ ɈɒʜɈ ƨdɒ⅃ nɘbni⅃ moɿʇ ɘboɔ ɘʜɈ llɒ ɘϱɿɘm oɈ ɘɿυɈυʇ ɘʜɈ oɈni bɘllɘvɒɿɈ oƨlɒ ɘv'I

.llɒ ƨwonʞ ɿɘwɘiV ɘʜT .mɘʜɈ bɘɘn υoγ ɘɿoʇɘd nɘvɘ ,bɘɘn υoγ ɈɒʜɈ ƨɘɿυɈɒɘʇ ni bbɒ lliw ɿɘwɘiV ɘʜɈ bnɒ γlʇ ɘʜɈ no υoγ oɈ Ɉqɒbɒ lliw IU ɘʜɈ ,ɿɘƨυ ɘʜɈ no Ɉnɘbnɘqɘb bnɒ ɔimɒnγb γlɘɈɘlqmoɔ ɘd oɈ ɿɘwɘiV ɘʜɈ ni ϱniʜɈ ɘlϱniƨ γɿɘvɘ bɘϱnɒʜɔ I

.ɘbɒm i ƨɈnɘmɘvoɿqmi ɘʜɈ ϱniɈnυoɔ Ɉon ,ɘɈɒɿɘmɒɿʇ ɘʜɈ ɘldυob γlʜϱυoɿ Ɉɘn lliw ɘnolɒ qυnɒɘlɔ ƨiʜɈ ,ɘboɔ Ɉƨɒʇ bnɒ Ɉnɘiɔiʇʇɘ γlʜϱiʜ Ɉɿɒ-ɘʜɈ-ʇo-ɘɈɒɈƨ ɘɈɒb oɈ qυ ʜɈiw Ɉi bɘɔɒlqɘɿ bnɒ ɘboɔ blo ɘʜɈ llɒ bɘvomɘɿ I

.niɒϱɒ qυ qoɿɔ ɿɘvɘ lliw ϱυd γnɒ ɈɒʜɈ ɘldiƨƨoqmi ƨi Ɉi ,ʇooɿqlooʇ γlɘɈɘlqmoɔ ɿɘwɘiV ɘʜɈ ɘbɒm bnɒ ɘɿυɈυʇ bnɒ Ɉnɘƨɘɿq ɘɔnɘɈƨixɘ ni ɿɘvɘ ϱυd ɘlϱniƨ γɿɘvɘ bɘxiʇ oƨlɒ I




.ɘɿom on ɘd blυow ɿɘwɘiV ƨiʜɈ qlɘʜ ƨ'ɈυoʜɈiw moʜw ƨɿɘɈɿoqqυƨ noɘɿɈɒԳ ɘʜɈ ɘƨɿυoɔ ʇo bnɒ ƨbɿow bniʞ ɘʜɈ ,γɈinυmmoɔ lɒγol ɘʜɈ oɈ ƨʞnɒʜɈ γnɒm ƨγɒwlɒ ƨA

KT Syakumi γઘ

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.9.9 "Visualizing Dragon"

 Here we are, almost two months later.

The final update before 4.0. The final update before i'll want to work on something big for once, the update i will finally attempt to tackle the long planned Animator. I feel unprepared and still have no idea how to do the UI... but there is no point in delaying it any further, at some point i have to JUST DO IT. For anyone who cares, why did the update take so long? I wanted this update to include as much fixing as possible, god knows how long i'll be busy with the Animator, i might start it and only stop when i'm happy with it or i might give up on it and restart several times, sinking months of work into it just to realize it won't work as well as i want it to... so before i venture into the unknown, i wanted to make this update the best it can be (and i hope i found all issues)...so...

Let's get right into the changes!

The new statusbar buttons have had a few fixes, all camera buttons should now work and in addition to that there is no a Camera Roll button whenever your camera is not leveled, finally a way to reset the camera roll with a simple click.

As per suggestion Windlights can now be put into the favoritesbar (but don't complain at me for it opening the editor, the favoritesbar executes whatever is the default behavior of the item you put into it), a new option to turn off impostor generation has been added (its only a debug option so far because unless i make it immediately derender impostors i didn't feel like its worth a setting in preferences, yet), the taskbar flashing when you receive an IM can now be toggled off (wow that was annoying... especially with autohiding taskbar), the Item Properties tab in inventory now finally uses SLURL's for creator and owner making it easier to get ahold of them and the option to upload disk snapshots directly to inventory as well while saving them.

Also a bunch of reported bugs have been squashed, including: wearable body parts not replacing when double clicking them, issues with getting disconnected towards the "precaching" phase on login due to extended unresponsive times, snapshots to inventory not being cropped anymore (its an option now), BOM allowing local textures to be used, Animesh showing empty complexity information and the onscreen controls not scaling with zoom factor like the keyboard and mouse controls do.

Other noteworthy changes are the snapshot window now scaling with the snapshot aspect ratio (without having to change the window aspect ratio), the ability to save 1024x1024 inventory textures directly and a new feature to flip poses in the Poser. Bear in mind that the snapshot window has been ripped entirely apart and duct taped back together because it was a huge scattered mess that made working with it hard and unnecessarily complicated (or outright impossible without workarounds), to fix this i had to essentially rip it into pieces and stitch it back together removing all the bridges, duplicate code, hacks and workarounds, it MIGHT be that something is not entirely working as before but overall the snapshot window seemed to work fine, if you find any weird behavior though report it as usual.

By Emeline Laks

By Spectris Audax

By Emeline Laks

By KT Syakumi

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.9.8 "Visualizing Dragon"

Fixes: *exist*

Me: I WANT YOU!

Bugs: *shaking in fear*

So many updates and so many fixes in such a short time, whats happening? I don't know but i'm in a damn good mood!

Fixes for starting on crashup when a controller is plugged in, fixes for crashing when editing linden grass/trees, fixes for snapshot tiling issues (both to disk and inventory, both color and depth shots), fixes for Deferred Rendering failing when SSR is on but everything else off, fixes for some fullbright objects being immune to haze, fixes for the Fixed Environment window becoming unusable when changing the windlight preset outside of the window while its open and fixes for the Viewer trying to start a conversation with that "None" group no one's talking to.

This update also sees some love to the Build window, people finally annoyed me enough to go about adding next/previous link/face/prim buttons, the grid options have all been moved into the Grid Options window which has now been renamed to Build Options and got a couple more build related options that are lesser used and buried in the menus. The main build/edit window has had the Only My Objects and Only Physical Objects options moved to Build Options too and instead has gotten Show Selection Outlines and and Snap to Grid option as checkbox now as replacement. Show Selection Outlines has also been added to Preferences - Viewer ... because apparently it was missing!

Also shhh: Quit Viewer shortcut has been removed for those that may or may not have accidentally quit the Viewer by hitting CTRL + Q (instead of Shift + Q for rolling the camera) with the "Do you want to quit" dialog disabled. No more accidentally yeeting the Viewer!

Also a big shoutout to Boston Blaisdale for making this incredibly good tutorial video about Black Dragon:

And another big shoutout to this video made by Phat Cat in Black Dragon with the help of the Poser/Animator:

I like this one, despite all the flaws and limitations SL has, this has quite something to show!

By Loverdag

By Loverdag

By Emelie Laks

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.9.7 "Visualizing Dragon"

 Fixed all the things, now its time to break them again!

Bringing the Viewer up on par with the very latest LL code.

These include a couple crashfixes, improvements in code and behavior around building, hover glow objects being functional again (you can find it in Dragon - Develop - Rendering), edit from inventory/worn/outfit (which i totally missed out on telling you about) and a couple extra changes from my side.

Note that from this update on, all textures on your objects will be counted, this means specular and normal maps will be included into complexity, they previously weren't (should tell you how broken LL's was), thanks for Flame Swenholt for finding that one!

By JILL

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.9.6 "Visualizing Dragon"

Yay for another update!

The focus once again being fixing all bugs that were reported after the big official code merge (and there were quite a few) as well as some old ones finally getting fixed. YEA!

Fixes include that you should no longer get banned from regions that ban people based on reported complexity, the Viewer now reports the official numbers, so no more getting banned when you deserve it, instead prepare to get banned when you wear optimized avatars, great! Don't worry though, the Viewer still uses the altered complexity formula for determining avatar complexity and will continue to do so... but i've used the chance to lower the complexity across the board by another 50%, this should further crunch down on huge numbers and will put some more emphasis on object features and textures.

Then, there has been an issue with water sparkle seemingly glowing through items at times, this is due to an issue in all Viewer where the shiny/glossiness reflection glows through fullbright objects. The reason water did this was because i allowed lights to be reflected on water again, which meant making water actually glossy (yes it actually wasn't), this in turn however meant the glossiness issue would appear on water as well. Sadly this isn't easy to fix (if at all) but i've added an option to switch between the original light reflections and the specularity reflections for those that want more accurate light reflections (they can be occluded by shadows) and lights reflecting on water or the original reflection which does not have this fullbright issue. Your choice!

While we are on the topic of environment, several EEP fixes from Drake that are coming officially have been ported over early, including better clouds, proper star positions, rainbows working without shadows, better sun gamma and several others. I'm sure with these EEP will look better than ever (or at least closer to windlight again)

And while we are at rendering, some users noticed that Deferred Rendering breaks when you turn off shadows and SSAO, this should no longer be the case and Deferred Rendering can once again be used without these (for whatever reason).

The rest of the fixes is mainly reported UI issues, like sliders/textboxes getting reverted/stuck when the UI refreshes them, high res depth snapshots not looking right, the posing status button not working, the teleport button in profiles not enabling, the Places window being completely hosed and Place Profiles not showing the correct information, the Media-on-a-prim UI being super broken and the Third Person Steering Mode and/or Right-Click drag not handling the rotate_left and rotate_right actions properly and replacing them with slide_left and slide_right (strafing instead of turning) like Left-Click dragging your avatar does.

There's also some great stuff to come in the near future too!

By Colorful

By Emely Laks

By Drago Silves

By Loverdag

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.9.5 "Visualizing Dragon"

 What's this? An update right you just released one? UwU

Fixes all reported bugs and does more.

BUT NIRAN YOU CANT FIX SHIT RIGHT ON THE NEXT DAY.

Fuck you i can, in fact i did. Sssssssss. Statuses should properly work, show and hide now, the stupid move floater should show the stand/stop flying buttons again and you can now turn off the status buttons if you don't like them. Also no more right-click menus while in Appearance or holding down Alt. *boomerangs into the distance*

By Emeline Laks

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.9.4 "Visualizing Dragon"

 Lets start the new year with a new update (and new bugs)

Let's leave the old bugs in the dust with this bugfix update and introduce lots and lots of new ones with the merge to the latest LL code, surely nothing is gonna break.

So what is fixed you may ask, none less than basically the entire known buglist in discord (minus the intel shader thingy and an animation bug that i still cannot reproduce but is a known issue in the official viewer too apparently)

Lots of warnings and errors, specifically log spamming warnings have been fixed which should hopefully clean up the log files a bit in case you encountered these. They can also reduce your framerate, writing something a million times per second into a log file takes its toll you know.

CTRL/Shift modifier keys when scrolling through values in spinners should be consistent now, rather than up doing ten times as much and down only a tenth of a fraction, both will now properly scroll either one of them depending on if you hold Shift (10x) or CTRL (0.1x).

A curious bug that required some very specific steps to be taken that resulted in the snapshot refresh button disabling your UI has been fixed, no more frantically asking for that toggle UI shortcut!

Sliders, especially those in the environment window were a little... afraid of the lowest and highest value, especially if your framerate dropped they would become increasingly more scared of these and tried to avoid being slid all the way there, this should no longer be the case.

On the SL forum i found an interesting thing that always kinda annoyed me too, whenever you zoom in/out your camera (CTRL + 8/0) the camera wouldn't update the sensitivity for camera movements, resulting in you being able to do only huge jumps of camera movement rather than very fine movements. Not only should this no longer be the case and zooming in should progressively raise sensitivity, i've also gone all the way and fixed a problem with mouse smoothing causing small scale (1 pixel onscreen movements) to be completely ignored by the Viewer when attempting to move the camera. Now every pixel counts.

I've also implemented a requested feature to display "statuses", such as when the camera focus is locked. Previously the Viewer already had this very... limited stand up button... i've extended this system to display all kinds of things, when you lock your focus, when free mouse focus is on, when the world is frozen, when you're sitting, flying, when always run is enabled, when you're posing... and in the future i can easily add more to this. Your statuses will be displayed at the bottom and they can be clicked to disable the status, say to stand up, stop flying, unfreeze world and so on.

As some hawk-eyed have noticed there is also a button hiding in the above system that implies a totally new feature.... crouch toggling! Yes you can now bind a crouch toggle button in the Keybindings tab and it will toggle crouch (until you hit it again, jump, fly, sit down etc). Now you can do pictures while crouched or just save your hand from holding down crouch the entire time.

Two last things, one being altitude based windlights not working, they should once again work (they basically always did but they weren't applied to you because the apply was never triggered).

The other one being something mostly interesting for human bodies. Thanks to Drake, shininess has been fixed back to pre-EEP levels. This should also fix light reflections randomly dimming/lighting up when camming around.

By Varosh

By Emeline Laks

By Loverdag