Black Dragon Viewer 64x - Update 5.4.4 "Volumetric Dragon"

Open your ocular receptors for they will be chromatically aberrated with this minor increase in numerical versioning.

For eons have people demanding Volumetric Lighting back, for it broke with PBR and i was unsure whether i would be able to fix it as PBR changed a lot of things around. Today however i have very positive news about that, as today marks the day of the return of Volumetric Lighting! 

But keen eyes will notice that there's MORE! Don't worry it is not your ocular receptors that fail you, it is Chromatic Aberration that is back too! Oh and it comes in two flavors now. You can now choose between having Chromatic Aberration always on as before or you can have it only in Depth of Field, this means only the blurred parts are aberrated.

You know, i'm not saying it looks nice, but it looks NICE!

That's not all though! Greyscale, Sepia and Posterization are now also available without having Tone Mapping or HDR enabled, Posterization now also affects Volumetric Lighting AND Glow as well!

We aren't stopping there! The POSER has gotten the promised pose synchronization last time, however it was only possible to synchronize your own pose to someone else, with this update it becomes possible to synchronize someone elses pose to them, so YES you can FINALLY see being posed! 

(Please keep in mind that this whole system abuses IM messages. That means if you sync too much stuff you'll be hit with an IM limit which will break syncing half-way through. I'm working on a solution for that. Also still you can only do this if both of you are on Black Dragon. NO this does NOT work with Firestorm, stop asking)

It might be unreliable, it might be buggy, it might break completely. Again keep in mind this is SUPER HACKY and abuses IMs to do its job, this is NOT meant as the final solution, this is merely an experiment and a preview for Linden Labs to show them how it would look like and that it can work for when we ultimately (hopefully) get this to the Official Viewer with server side sync.

One last honorable mention: People have been complaining about the login screen video talking terrorist speak when it ends (which it shouldn't... but...). This was due to the Youtube embed function defaulting to Turkish or something due to the inability to detect your preferred language via cookies. I've now forced the embed link to prefer english so no more people getting afraid they got their Viewer hacked or something.

Anyway, here's something less positive to say:

A while ago i was contacted by a long time patreon patron who was unhappy with the lack of communication (assuming they meant the Viewer not getting updates nor messages on Discord) who ultimately ended his patronage after 4 years.

Let me say that i feel you. 

I'm sorry for the lack of updates and communication. Life has been steadily getting harder and you aren't the only one who dropped out of Patreon. Over time the amount of people subscribed to Patreon has steadily declined to the point i could no longer keep up with the increasing demands of my dirty capitalist country so for several months now i've been falling short on cash, at first i was able to churn through with some saved up money but it never recovered and i was eventually forced to make a decision, either end it here or find another way. 

I was determined to make it work somehow... it's only a couple eurons missing right? So i started taking comissions after several people requested them, told me i should do comissions because they are eager to pay for my work. So aside from working on the Viewer and my other million projects as well as juggling real life and friends, i'm now also juggling comissions to earn that little bit of missing cash. 

This took away time from the Viewer obviously, which resulted in the development getting slower and slower and more and more comissions had to be taken to make up for the steadily increasing lack of patreon funds. This created a death spiral, more comissions, less development, less patrons, less money, more comissions and so on...

I didn't say anything because i didn't want to worry anyone nor do i want to beg for money, after all if people don't want to support me anymore then that's their choice and a completely legit reason. No one is forcing anyone to support me but as much as i don't want to say it, the Viewer does depend on me and i depend on this money... and with the grips tightening to the point that i feel like i can no longer offset the missing funds and with that one message giving me a big wake up call, i think it might finally time to say it: I do not think i can make this work much longer, the next month might already not work out anymore. So unless this somehow stabilizes again we will soon have to switch from very little communication to no communication... as in shutting the light off.

I hate saying this but: the Viewer is dying.

Patreon is what kept the Viewer alive. Everyone who financially supported me kept this Viewer alive several many more years than anticipated. Thank you everyone for that.

(For anyone interested in the exact numbers, 400 was chosen as the Patreon "goal" because it covers the mandatory health insurance (265€ / ~310$) and internet provider cost (55€ / ~65$). That is with conversion from $ to € that was enough.)

Anyway, i hope you like the update, the return of Volumetric Lighting, it has been a long ride.