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.

Sunday, June 6, 2021

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