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