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.

Tuesday, July 20, 2021

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

16 comments:

  1. Hello! Thanks for the update! Question: How can I derender my own attachments? And, is there any chance you'd consider adding a way to hide your "lookat" target?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hide LookAt is a no-go feature.

      You can derender your own attachments via the menu (Dragon - My Useful Features - Shortcuts - Derender) only

      Delete
    2. I see, thanks for the quick reply, now allow me to bother you with another question haha: Does the Viewer has a spell-checking feature like Firestorm? It doesn't seem to be underlining when I wrote something wrong.

      Thanks for all the hard work you've put into this! the Viewer is amazing!

      Delete
    3. BD does have a spellchecker and autocomplete but both have been disabled because they were not working most of the time (due to permission issues within the Viewer folder they were put to when added). I might check them again at some point.

      Delete
  2. How can I get a good shadow without it looking pixelated and there is that big blur that the photos above show? Do you recommend any configuration?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Use the light blur slider for that, it depends on your scene, windlight and all other settings, there is no one-setup-fits-them-all.

      Delete
  3. I'm sure you've gotten this question a lot, but do you plan on adding an AO feature or are you still completely against it..still?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The answer remains the same: When LL gives us the ability to communicate serverside AO functions directly to the server without having to use scripts, i'll happily add one. Otherwise nope.

      Delete
  4. hey! i have a problem, when i start the viewer, it open... but all black... i cant see the menus or login. i've tried non avx and the avx version and visual c++.
    Can u help?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You'll have to do a full clean reinstall of all of them. Follow the FAQ, it details which things need to be removed and reinstalled, if those don't help you might have to upgrade/downgrade your graphics drivers.

      Delete
  5. ??? The voice dot causes performance issues? How!?! What is that little dot DOING...

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    Replies
    1. I don't know which part of it exactly was causing the framerate to drop but i assume that it was most likely the "wave" calculation and rendering

      Delete
  6. not sure why but when i log in my character is constantly stuck going left and when i click WSAD it wont stop very odd.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Do you mind sending me the link to download the black dragon viewer?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Its on the right side "Download Black Dragon"

      Delete