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.

Friday, March 14, 2025

Black Dragon Viewer 64x - Update 5.3.0 "Scaling Dragon"

 OOF.


Well here we are, back again at it. People have been crying for an update (people actually want to update?). So, here we are, merged with the latest Linden code and on par with the "ForeverFPS" release that came out a week ago, armed to the teeth with support for 2k PBR Terrain, which should complete 2k resolution support and a billion crash fixes (probably also a billion new crashes), most notably a fix for crashing when adding someone to the group banlist. 

Now i don't know if the changing the view angle still crashes or if that has been fixed too (since i cannot reproduce it) but i suppose we'll see. So if you still crash on changing the camera angle (zoom in/out) please let me know, i have some ideas how i could get to the bottom of whats happening.

Either way, this release also comes with some new options, options to set the Tone Mapper as well as how much it is mixed into the final image, both of these options did not work in my testing, so i don't know what's up with them.... but they are there, maybe they need some other setting to work... i really don't know, i'll have to test these options in the Linden Viewer, they are not yet supposed to be surfaced. Also an option to limit texture resolution... because 2k textures are really big you know.... we can also now choose between FXAA and SMAA antialiasing. Honestly in all my years i've played games SMAA has always been absolute trash, costing more performance (sometimes 2-3 FPS) for what looks essentially like no AA at all, i'd still recommend FXAA over SMAA any day but it is there if you want it. Lastly an option has been added for "Vintage Mode" which turns off some advanced PBR rendering things internally which can improve performance (if the description is to be believed), if you are having issues with performance this might be worth a try. All of these can be found in Preferences - Display as usual.


I'd also like to say sorry for the long silence... a lot has happened... and its not doing me any favors, the last few months have been very stressful and involved a lot of extra work keeping me busy all day to make up for the low patreon amount, which meant i had little time to work on the Viewer. Whenever i get around to make another update video (which has been on a long backburner too) i will most likely not be able to hold myself back and will want to talk about this, so expect it to be a long video, unless i manage to cut it shorter somehow.