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.

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Black Dragon Viewer - Update 2.4.3.6 "Notification Update"

As hinted, another update, quite a few changes.


Biggest change in this update is the new notification floater (sys well) which is now tabbed and cleaned up. It contains a lot more information about each notification and should make navigating and filtering your notifications easier. This change comes from the official Project Notification Viewer which is currently available as Project Viewer. I added it since i was working on the sys well anyway (added the missing clear all notifications button) as there's no real point in changing anything in there now if its being trashed later on anyway. Of course i did not just merge it, i did my own changes to it as well, you know me, i just can't leave this space wasting sucker as it is.



Apart from that there's another bunch of RLVa fixes aswell as the rest of my own SnapshotFloaterImprovements project (STORM-2118).

This update also includes a new rendering feature, i've been very annoyed lately by the shadow rendering distance which is bound to your draw distance, i thought that it's time to finally change this and allow a custom value, that means from now on the distance at which you can see shadows is no longer bound to your draw distance, instead it is a totally freely modifiable value like any other, you can set your draw distance to 64m and set the shadow rendering distance to 192m to see all the shadows of the terrain and some objects that were previously shadow-less because the shadows were fading already. This however comes at a small cost, increasing the shadow draw distance will reduce the overall shadow precision, that is because shadows are split into shadow clip planes, 4 shadow textures if you will, these shadow textures have a given resolution (which you can set in preferences), increasing the shadow rendering distance scales up all 4 planes equally, increasing the area one texture has to cover, reducing the precision in that area obviously. You COULD counter this by increasing the shadow resolution or multiplier but that would impact framerate. Oh didn't i mention? This feature should have almost no impact on performance since there is no additional rendering to do, same resolution (unless you change it), same quality, same rendering technique, same everything just in a bigger area. I suppose the following picture speaks for itself.


The other cool thing about this is, it affects Volumetric Lighting too, that's because Volumetric Lighting is calculated via the shadow clip planes and shadow maps, so if we increase the area the shadows cover, we also increase the area Volumetric Light covers, AWESOME.


The above is the normal 64m Draw Distance with normal 64m (even a bit more than default) shadow distance. The following image shows what happens if you increase the shadow rendering distance to something like 256m.


Basically you are doing the same as increasing the Draw Distance, without actually doing it! Cool. You can find this option in both the machinima sidebar and preferences.

So, apart from that, there's a small change to SSAO, i made it a bit stronger, i think it was way too weak (almost non existent).

I also re-enabled the auto-hide system folder feature for Textures, Sounds, Calling Cards, Landmarks, Notecards, Scripts, Photo Album, Animations, Gestures, Favorites and My Outfits folders but disabled the feature by default to prevent issues from arising again. If you want this feature enabled you'll have to enable it via the debug "DebugHideEmptySystemFolders", you will have to relog or at least create a new Inventory floater (File -> New Inventory Window)
I also got a new Avatar ;)



Have fun.







Changelog:



2.4.3.6


Added: Ability to change shadow rendering distance.
Added: "Close all Notifications" button to sys well.
Changed: Extended Shadow Distance slider length.
Changed: Commented out my close all notifactions button.
Changed: Moved "Reset" button and "Insert" dropdown a bit so they align properly.
Changed: Revamped new tabbed Notification System a bit. Less horrible space wasting.
Changed: (Experimental) Enabled autohiding of Textures, Sounds, Calling Cards, Landmarks, Notecards, Scripts, Photo Album, Animations, Gestures, Favorites and My Outfits folders.
Changed: Disabled Autohiding of empty folders by default.
Changed: SSAO defaults, made it a bit stronger.
Fixed: Some ugly empty spaces and misaligns in the Group floater in certain circumstances.
Fixed: Compile after RLVa merge.
Merged Project Notification
MAINT-4734 (Separate transaction notices from group notice/invites)
Merged SnapshotFloaterImprovements
STORM-2118: Fixed: Freeze World commit function not firing, we should use the correct name next time.
STORM-2118: Fixed: Toggling the checkbox several times while the debug was active and vise versa caused the modes to override each other.
Merged RLVa
- internal : "ForceInitialCOFDelay" is no longer used
- internal : RLVa files #include clean-up
- fixed : orphaned COF links (=remote deleted but not local deleted) cannot be removed when AIS is enabled
- changed : "Rebake textures" first synchronizes the COF version before requesting an appearance update
- fixed : don't create links to non-outfit folders in COF
- fixed : RlvGiveToRLVOffer::onCategoryCreateCallback should be called with a folder UUID
- fixed : crash when wearing a folder containing an item with the same asset UUID as a worn item
- fixed : LLInventoryCallback::fire() is called with the NULL UUID when creating links using AIS
- fixed : RLVaWearReplaceUnlocked isn't enabled by default on non-Catznip viewers

3 comments:

  1. WHere is teh avi from? *graby paws*

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  2. Oh sweet, the Solarian avi is really cool. I have yet to buy one but having seen photography and clips of the facial animations the avi possesses, I'm really impressed at such an animated avatar in SL.

    Thank you so, so much for enabling hiding system folders. *loud cheering* ^^

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