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.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Release 2.0.1 (2212)

NOTE #2: When i do a blogpost and the Download link is still pointing to a previous version , just select the "Files" tab at Sourceforge and select the new version manually , sometimes i forget to set the new file as default!
NOTE: Crash = Clear your settings and cache!

A week focused on fixing your bugs and following most of your feedback.

SO, i managed to fix pretty much everything you threw at my head.

User Interface:

Biggest change here is that i´ve been working (the last few hours) on a fading system for chat and IMs aswell as system messages and group messages , i made a video here to show you how it looks , how long they fade is dependant from your fading time settings. They can be found in Chat/IM settings.



The other things are mostly fixes that were feedback posted on other blogs or directly IMed to me. Those include that you wished for tooltips for those Inventory sorting filters , seperate icons for Pathfinding toolbar buttons , some translation errors and some floaters not correctly redarkening the Preferences panel.

Other things include that i remade the Spellcheck and Translation floater and moved the Joystick button down below the actual control options instead of beeing on the far right.


Lookat:

With 2.0 i released a forced hack not everyone liked that much , it was a temporarly fix to prevent your Lookat Axis from beeing broadcasted to other Viewers, however my simple hack also made your Avatar not follow your Alt-Zoom anymore which was sadly the trade-off. I removed that hack and replaced it with the hide lookat feature from Firestorm and modded it to be forced on all the time , no way to disable it , but you will not need to disable it anyway...

Plugin:

I made an experimental and probably very dangerous change , the plugin (browser , webmedia etc) has been tweaked so it fires its sleep_time call 10 times shorter and faster , meaning that Youtube videos as example that take alot of ressources to render smoothly will now render alot smoother than before , however a bit of lagging will always be there but if that change causes extreme lag or FPS drop tell me , im planning to reduce it to 5 times anyway ...or make it changable...

Fixes:

A little fix that Drake IMed me a few hours ago was implemented last minute that should prevent a crash in llworld.cpp (no idea when that should happen but anyway...).

I also implemented the fix for Sea level not rendering correctly on private islands which was suggested in SLU Forums.

Did you know?:

My Viewer was placed as second most stable up-to-date Third Party Viewer this week!


as always,
enjoy,
Niran

Changelog:


2.0.1

added a Nearby Chat / Toast fading system
added Tooltips for Inventory sort filters
added 2 different Pathfinding Icons for characters and linksets
added Firestorm´s current hide lookat and modded it to be forced on
removed my hide lookat hack and fixing the avatar head issue
fixed People floater not redarkening preferences when opened via block list
fixed Joystick floater now redarkening preferences when clicking ok/apply
fixed Blur Background Option translation not working
fixed some German labels and wrong written words
fixed Plain Text Chat History beeing always disabled
fixed ParcelMediaURLFilter message always reappearing in message.xml
fixed a crash in llworld.cpp
fixed torn off menu floaters becoming too dark
fixed (potentially) issues with some options becoming unavailable on some cards
updated contributions.txt
changed some CAPITALIZED titles and words
changed Land options labeling
changed the maximum amount of CPU ressources a plugin can use by 10 times
changed the joystick button layout
tweaked Spellcheck floater layout and size
tweaked Translation floater layout and size
tweaked Notification and Chat life time and fading times
MAINT-1161: non standard sea level not correctly rendered around private islands.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Nirans Viewer 2.0 - Reboot (2185)

WARNING: I might read your blog and what you´ve got to say about my Viewer , i will make a shitstorm rain uppon your head if i read complains about something that has been explicitely explained here and you just dont get it because you´re either too stupid or too lazy to read my blog posts. Seriously *starts poo-ing enough crap to make it rain uppon someone*.
WARNING #2: CLEAN YOUR CACHE & SETTINGS , THEN PRAISE TO GOD!
NOTE: A crash on startup CAN happen rarely , just try it again.

Rated [A] for Adult

Extreme voilent and dangerous words ahead!

Pointlessly reboot your PC and you will embrace the greatness of this Viewer! something like that...

anyway lets get to the today´s Topic.

It has taken alot of time and effort to get this Viewer so far, since 2011 when i started this Viewer for the first time it has undergone changes , some more extreme than others , some completely different from everything you´ve seen in any other Viewer and i think thats exactly what makes this Viewer so special and fun to use , everytime you start it up , it surprises you with another (crash) new thing you havnt yet seen yet , like a magic box full of great randomness! Since 1.49 i´ve worked 2 months more or less in secret to create 1.5 which at that time should have been the last and final release , due to this decision i´ve not released it in the next week , instead i´ve taken all the time i needed to make this very last version the (hopefully) best version ever. This action took so long and included so many changes that i changed the version to 2.0 and named it "Reboot" because basically that describes what it does. It tries to "reboot" the whole experience by completely restarting from 0 internally and working up all the way back to the top where it belongs. I´ve also changed my mind about this version beeing the last one , i will continue maintaining this Viewer for quite some more time (otherwise i wouldnt have a Viewer to use hehe) , no matter what other "wanna-be" cool and professional Viewer devs say. This is my work , im doing it like i want it to do and it works this way , fuck off if everything you can do about my work is just shaking your head because you think its pathetic what i do , remember that you started down there aswell.

So , over 2 months in making , you can expect ALOT of changes , i´ve hammered and finetuned things here , there and everywhere , cleaned up alot of spaces , translated lots of text lines and completely reworked alot of general stuff like layout , look , feeling etc. When coming from 1.49 or earlier version you will probably be nuked , those that tried my Beta´s have had a taste of what has been changed , fixed , added and removed.

One last thing. CLEAN YOUR GODDAMN SETTINGS & CACHE!


User Interface:


My favorite part because its the part in which most changes happen hehehe....muahahahahaha

The biggest change here is the new Preferences panel , i´ve gotten lots of good and bad feedback , i tried to fix as much bugs and non working functions as possible and implemented some features to make this new Preferences panel , which now replaces the Preferences floater completely , as easy to use as possible , however if you still got feedback , lemme know. From now on all buttons and key combinations will lead to the new Preferences panel which will open with a blurred and darkened background by default , the blurring can be disabled if you wish and the background darkening level can be set via a slider. It will also automatically hide the background if you open any of its floaters and redarken the background when you close those again. Lets go some steps back , im talking about this panel and maybe you dont even know what it is ...ok here we go , its a fullscreen replacement for what you´ve known as the Preferences window , it scales over your whole SL screen to allow much more space to be used , effectively reducing the amount of scrollbars and tabs/subpanels needed to display all functions.

Your Inventory has been changed a bit , i´ve had some reports that those filters wont check , so you never know which one was active and which werent. I couldnt fix that issue in that Filter menu so i pulled those Filters out and made buttons for them. Now you can just tick them at all times , always seeing which Filter is active at the moment. Take a look at the picture below (Sort objects by name , Sort objects by date , Sort folders by name and put System folders always to top , in that order)

When you start chatting or when you get IMs weither those are Group , Private or Ad-hoc ones , you will most likely notice that they look different , alot different , i changed their background image , realigned them a bit and made them look like small cards which i think looks really cool and is also extremly readable.

I´ve also added 3 new loadingscreen pictures for your viewing pleasure , so it never gets boring! take a look at them here (i´ve put them at first so you will be able to see them for sure)



Note that these pictures were taken with a 6000x3306 resolution , shadows set to 2,5 times their resolution and Depth of Field pulled to the max and disabled FXAA , then downsampled to my ordinary 1920x1055 resolution, resulting in extreme image quality. None of those pictures have been edited except that they were downsampled , what you see is the pure graphical quality of Second Life´s rendering pipeline.

There were some little complains (from me also) that the Preferences panel was a bit too slow to use especially those buttons that show/hide , widget by widget , which takes some time , so i reduced the amount of time each widget needs drastically resulting in a far quicker show/hide animation.

The Environment Editor was really bugged , at first Regiolight didnt work , fixing that caused Day Cycles to break both resulted in quite some redoing of the whole panel and the new layout now is alot smaller and hopefully still easy to understand. Please tell me if theres something i could do here.


And because its not worth mentioning that this feature was ported from Exodus and originally came from Firestorm , i wont , because im the "asshole" who steals stuff anyway , no matter how often i tell people that I DIDNT DO IT , GAWD FUCKING DAMNIT! - i just fixed the cloud transitions which (no matter what Ansariel says) WERENT FIXED in their Firestorm code GAWDFUCKINGDAMNIT. I merged all fixes from Ansariel for Windlight animations and cloud density and position didnt animate correctly , they were forced at the end causing them to jump into their correct values.

I also found it way over the top to code every color picker seperatly to work for my new Preferences panel , so i created a floater (as seen in the previous picture already) that collects all color oriented options in one big window , easy to access via the Preferences panel.

The ugly Autoreplace floater also has been overhauled basically , nothing too special , just took out that ugly borders and aligned everything again , will clean up this one and Translation aswell as Spellchecker in later releases.

The Topbar (combination of Navigationbar , Statusbar and Favoritebar at the top) has also been altered a bit , you will notice white "template" buttons , border lines that split some parts and a white "template" sound icon to fit the look of the new Topbar. All in one it looks slightly cleaner and while i where mocking around up there i fixed the settings button in that Media settings mini floater which didnt open the Preferences panel.

Dont let us forget about the new Login panel background video which can also be watched here in full quality and smooth experience!


and alot more... (read the changelog for more not so important stuff on what has been changed)

Rendering:

Rendering has been minimally changed , i recalibrated (like Garrus) some defaults , i also disabled Color Correction by default to prevent darkness in non Deferred + Tone Mapping. That means if you want to see Tone Mapping as i intended it to be seen , enable Deferred , Ambient Occlusion , High Precision Rendering , Tone Mapping and leave Gamma Correction OFF! , then go to High Precision panel and set Color Correction (its a dropdown) to Linear and you´re done. Tone Mapping has been tweaked with alot of feedback , also mentioned in previous posts that it looked too dull , now it should look pretty ok and IF you want it more colorfull....well enable Gamma Correction BUT also tick re-initialize the shaders when you do , because when you switch it on/off , alphas remain shaded as they were before , they need to be re-rendered which only happens if you tick one of those many shader features like Deferred , Cloth Simulation etc. meaning you will have to tick and then untick them again.













Aimee Arcana in my group send me a nice water map which i included as default in the Viewer now , it looks really cool and high quality , you can also manually set the coresponding water preset called "High Definition".


Performance:

Performance should have slightly increased from any previous releases (1.49 and downwards) due to over 200+ warnings and initialization errors that have been fixed internally yay!

Translations:

This was and still is a bitch and will always remain one , all stuff i do has to be translated sooner or later and in this Release i´ve looked through alot of floaters and panels (especially Preferences) and translated them all or atlast fixed their translations if they were available already. If you find something untranslated , please let me know!

Fixes:

Other fixes include that if you´ve set my Viewer as default Viewer to open whenever you click a SLURL in your browser , it didnt recognize my Viewer anymore , opening another instance of it , this shouldnt happen anymore now , if it still does , let me know

When starting out with fresh settings you often ended up having glow max alpha set to 0.001 due to my fading progressscreen , i think i fixed that issue , check your glow max alpha setting if its set to 0.225 as it should , otherwise you might not see glow where it should!

I´ve included an uninstaller.bat file which you can start to easily remove the cache , settings and or viewer folder if you´re not too fond of browsing in hidden folders , you can also use this to do a quick clean manual cache clear. It will ask you what you want to delete , just type in Y for yes and N for no and press enter to accept.

Did you know?:

My Viewer´s crashrates dropped extremly this week , it went around Singularity , Catznip and Exodus and nearly even Phoenix!

Lookat is GONE! you will never ever hear complains about your lookat beeing at someone, im sick of hearing it "we want a feature to turn it off" i turned it off forcefully, thats it!

Snapshots:



















still havnt got enough yet? check out my newest video...


Thank you and enjoy,
Niran

Download:

oh and before i forget , 64bit doesnt mean the Viewer is optimized for 64bit , it means it utilizes the ability to use more memory than a 32bit executable can.

Changelist:


2.0 Reboot

added a new High Definition water preset , thanks to Aimee Arcana

added a background transparency slider to Preferences panel
added Martin RJ´s go-to line function for script editor and redone it to not use a seperate floater
added RLVa Tab to Preferences Panel
added Gistya Eusebio´s potential memory leak fix
added Armin´s fix for image decoding fails beeing handled not that good
added Hardware Skinning to Machinima Panel as suggested
added ability to disable preferences background blur
added Marketplace toolbar button
added Windlight transition animation on changing presets/regiolight or daycycle
added a little dancing Niran as loadingindicator to loading screen
added a Map Camera preset (not yet in use)
added auto-fade function to Preferences background when a floater is opened from there
added auto-defade function to Preferences background when those floaters are closed again
added a seperate floater for all color related options
added 3 new loadingscreen pictures
tweaked default Tone Mapping settings
tweaked default Depth of Field settings to a somewhat "real" camera preset
tweaked Stats floater alignment
tweaked Debug settings floater alignment and layout
tweaked Toolbar button floater to fit all buttons in again
tweaked default floater transparency
tweaked default Near me range and max Object size on minimap
tweaked Chat and IM toast floater position a bit
tweaked Navigation bar to have a Chrome-like look
tweaked Local Chat text and avatar icon alignment
tweaked Sys-well floater look a bit
tweaked open/closing time for Preferences panel buttons
tweaked readability of some half transparent tip labels
tweaked avatar list panel layouts a little bit
tweaked open/closing time for IM control panels
tweaked edit shape panel for better space usage
fixed Progressscreen reverting your glow/camera angle settings every teleport
fixed Tools floater getting refreshed all the time with color picker open causing lag
fixed crash when image decoding happens
fixed default indicators not showing the correct default value (3x)
fixed Viewer overblurring underwater causing freezes
fixed broken Login translations
fixed logpath line editor not getting disabled correctly
fixed some miswritings in german UI (Standard not Standart)
fixed angular retations for objects that got broken with Pathfinding
fixed Auto-login option not beeing persistant over logins
fixed over 200 warnings about missing widgets , debug settings etc etc
fixed underwater distortion not allowing more than 30 in Machinima Panel
fixed IM Control panel for P2P chats
fixed Regiolight not working/not selectable
fixed some Preferences panel blurring logic
fixed Mechatoy sponsored logo appearing grey on first start
fixed some Shader errors for some video cards
fixed world going totally black when disabling Ambient Occlusion
fixed crash on startup when no settings files where created yet
fixed L$ balance positioning (hopefully)
fixed some options having different starting values than their debug settings
fixed close buttons for toasts not correctly aligned
fixed Local Chatbar title coming through Chatbar on lower transparency levels
fixed IMs with 5 or more lines causing resizing issues
fixed Viewer preferences panel having a scrollbar when it shouldnt
fixed Channel and Version name at login beeing to short and going into a second line
fixed phantom shadows appearing at 140m and upwards
fixed beeing unable to switch to day cycle and change day cycle presets
fixed scripts getting cut off at line 12 and beyond
fixed windlight buttons in navigation bar not showing their floaters when pressed
fixed Camera Preset editors not working in Preferences panel
fixed Mini-map chat range rings not showing
fixed place profile showing uninitialized tabs when coming from search
fixed Prim type not showing in Tools floater
fixed Viewer not recognized by Browser resulting in opening another instance
fixed UI Invidualisation scrollbar
fixed lots of widgets having same names resulting in not beeing able to be translated
fixed Alpha´s beeing lit differently than normal mesh (mostly hairs were affected)
fixed Media control settings button not opening new Preferences
fixed Inventory filters not correctly ticking by redoing them completely as buttons
fixed take-off menu in self inspector not opening
fixed IM control panel button not triggering correctly when clicked the first time
changed Depth of Field default Resolution to 1.0
changed some Loadingscreen tips and retranslated some others for better understanding
changed some Menu entry labels for better understanding
changed Loadingscreen tips to show the path to new Preferences panel
changed Windlight editor translations for better understanding
changed alot of major graphic feature tooltips to explain better what they do
changed some Toolbar button label and tooltips in german UI
changed Preferences background to allow clicking through it
cleaned up some XML files
changed some Sky Preset names
changed some labels in german and english UI invidualisation panel
changed Chat/IM/Group and some Floater backgrounds for a cleaner and cooler look
changed Topdown and default Shoulder view labels
changed some strings in english/german for the shape panel
removed Shining Project from codebase
removed pre-materials experiments with bumpmapping dropdown
removed double search menu entry in main menu
removed CoreHTTP project
removed some unused Toolbar buttons (from pathfinding)
removed MapShowTelehubs debug
removed Windlight floater functions to revert your settings automatically on close
removed Preferences floater everywhere from my Viewer, goodbye
removed my rotation degree feature due to LL implementing a default one
removed UI Size slider and readded it as dropdown to give 3 size presets , for better support
removed backup graphic preset
removed all color pickers and color options from Preferences panel
removed the sliding effect of my login panel on start
removed Preferences panel menu entry in login main menu
removed the floater resizing corner texture (looked bad)
removed lots of unused files
merged up with Linden Labs beta
disabled Nav Mesh upload due to not having the havok license
disabled Preferences button in login
disabled Lookat for zoom completely (RAAAAAGE)
moved agent recorder translations in main menu to work correctly again
translated some main menu entries that werent translated yet
translated the Preferences panel
translated Place profile
translated Machinima Sidebar (again)
translated all Preferences subpanels
translated all new Loadingscreen tips
translated Pathfinding status buttons
translated Windlight settings floater
translated IM control panels
translated new Snapshot floater
translated Inventory sorting
translated some edit wearable panels in "my Appearance" floater

Thursday, October 18, 2012

2.0 (2136) Beta 3

ok guys last beta until release!

i fixed the topbar windlight buttons , regio light and some other things aswell as implemented some suggestions for the new preferences panel, the old preferences floater is from now on GONE. COMPLETLY! DONT SEARCH FOR IT.

This Beta is for testing the new stuff and reporting the remaining few little UI bugs if you find some. I will try to fix them while finishing the Release which is basically just fleshing out the UI and translating everything to German.

sorry the download is on dropbox this time , sourceforce somehow cant manage to fully upload @.@

enjoy,
Niran

Friday, October 12, 2012

2.0 (2107) Beta

For those, that uh havnt noticed...
i released a Beta of 2.0 a bit ago...
well and heres Beta #2!

Download Beta 2.0 #2

for scripters having problems with saved scripts not fully showing:
Script Editor Fix

for those having shadows EVERYWHERE starting at 140m , open the Main Menu , NV -> Advanced -> Debug Settings. Type in "RenderShadowBiasError" , set its value from -0.00X to 0.000. The problem should be fixed now.

Have fun and enjoy,
Niran