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, February 14, 2012

1.23(.5) Release

ugh , i was "quiet" for a long time in my blog , im very sorry for that , but RL meeting with friends were more important atm , but dont worry i havnt forgotten you in this time, there were a lot of internal changes , fixes and even some render pipeline changes again :) , you may wonder why its called 1.23.5 , because its funny that its called like Lindens latest Viewer 1 was...

ok lets get to the important stuff , the changes...

User Interface:
A lot and probably the most changes have been done in the Interface again , some of those changes are... the Z coordinate in Script Errors , meaning whenever it compiles with an error it will give out a Z value additionally to the already 2 ones ...
another change is the font and coloring style of the Friend list or your "Acquaintances" , offline people will be shown in italic red and online people will be shown in bold italic green , making them differ a bit more , also new in the same window is the (like said before) renaming of Friends to Acquaintances (please correct me or tell me a better name for it) as a lot of people are just inviting people randomly or after a few hours already thats not what someone would call "friends" right? you only have a handfull of "Friends" and aslong as we dont have the ability to sort and organize those lists it will be called Acquaintances in my Viewer... the last change in this panel is the always on permission system which i´ve upgraded to finally be what i want it to be , it will now show ALL Permissions from beginning instead of showing it when it was hovered =D

Next section was Preferences which might seem to be in a total refactor state , ...well they are , atlast some parts of it , Advanced was redone completly , Camera , Movement and Mouselook Controls and Options are now "seperated" in different panels which can be opened by clicking the coresponding button , i guess i will transplant this look to Advanced Graphics and maybe Viewer Tab aswell depending on your feedback

 ...coming to Viewer tab , which has got a few new options , i thought it would be really important for you to add atlast simple protections like left click sit/touch disable and not just for protection , it REALLY FUCKING annoys me when i do something in my browser , move my mouse over to SL and just click into the window and for god´s sake ALWAYS hit something i can touch OR sit on.... its ANNOYING ... together with those you will also find the new auto hide topbar feature which will be explained and shown later
...and the Graphics panel , which has been redone atlast the shader part of it , you will notice no buttons anymore , just plain simple checkboxes again for those who are too "blind" to see the difference between pressed and non pressed buttons... (yea i know some people...)

...uhm well then there was a Local Chat option in the main menu which has been removed because of non functionality ... the Toolbar floater has been optimised to look ok for German translation aswell ... an stop all animations double has been removed and the ability to minimise the chat floater has been removed as it caused realy weird breakage sometimes

Features:
Nirans Viewer Labs Experiments present you the autohiding topbar , the topbar which is the Navigationbar , Favouritebar and the well known Statusbar (from Viewer 1) which holds the Time , Money , Net and Media controls aswell as the Main Menu ... it will now AUTOMATICALLY slide out and only leave the smaller mini top info bar whenever it is not hovered or used for 10 seconds! its off by default but you can find the Option in Preferences - Viewer - User Interface


again the Labs present you....customisable rotation speed and degree options! , now you can make your SL act like RPGs , or just act more sensetive , your Avatar can be set to rotate instantly , very slowly or very fast... you can also set WHEN your Avatar should start rotating in the camera direction , should your Avatar rotate whenever you move your cam only one single degree in any direction? should your Avatar rotate not at all? THIS IS FOR YOU!  , note this is only local , others will see you rotating as their viewer have other non setable values and will use those on everyone , aswell as my Viewer will use those on anyone else , this goes for BOTH rotation speed and degree!




i´ve also added Jonathan´s "official" .anim file support , which now isnt hacked anymore , you can really select .anim files when clicking upload Animations , it comes with an animation and anim preview which are both seperatly now...

Camera:
as already explained above there were some "fundamental" changes on the behavior of the Camera and your Avatar but theres more , i´ve replaced the Front View in Camera floater with Top View , its like a Topdown View also known from some games (yea i really want to make SL feel more game like) ...and most important , you can now tweak ALL 3 presets via Preferences menu there will be spinners for each preset you want to edit in Preferences - Advanced (which has been redone completly) , cool eh?

Rendering:
rendering has probably had the tiniest changesets , all in one thing big has been done here except Tofu´s new project which has been merged , its called worldspace semi-random macro-dappling , which creates random big darkness spots on a SIM and your Avatar , depending on the sun positon , later this could be combined with the cloud X and Y movement to create a good but faked cloud shadow effect! awesome , for now you can only tweak the darkness strength , the option can be found in Preferences - Advanced Graphics - Lighting and Shadows

Building:
for those (like me) having problems clicking the stretch buttons for X Y and Z you can now hold down X while having them in edit to hide the edge stretch cubes making it easier to click only the colored ones

Fixes:
i cannot say much here , just a few logic changes , some little fixes like ad-hoc messages are now not recieved anymore if you ticked only friends and groups can call or IM me , some render fixes for mac and linux , some shader compilation errors here and there , a horizontal dof line has also been fixed , avatar bakes should work correctly now and not get some crap , 100% transparent objects shouldnt take up too much performance anymore as they dont get "rendered" anymore (i dont believe that because FPS would probably rocket if that would really happen)...and some misc stuff in my UI , german translations , english texts and labels etc etc...blub , really uninteressting stuff

Note:
i hope i havnt forgotten anything important here except that this only comes in LAA version again , before i do a non LAA please give me feedback about it if it helped in any way , otherwise i dont see a reason to do it again




can you find the special "guest" on this pic?


Changesets:

VWR-27809 When building it is often diffcult to stretch an object along a narrow axis
STORM-1810 Display Z coordinate in Script Error window
STORM-1807 Play animation floater 2nd play button active while animation is playing
STORM-1804 Details... button on PERMISSION_DEBIT dialog triggers run_time_permissions() with a deny action
STORM-1803 Adding raw anim file upload support
STORM-1795 Ad-hoc messages are received even when "Only friends and groups can call or IM me"
STORM-1718 For notifications.xml Mute and Ignore in ScriptDialog and ScriptDialogGroup can collide with user-supplied fields causing unexpected behavior
SH-2964 Fix for shader compilation error on some older NVIDIA cards.
SH-2963 Fix for highlight transparent not highlighting 100% transparent objects.
SH-2908 Rework indexed texture rendering to use a uvec4 instead of a float for texture indices in the data stream.  Also rework gl_FragColor overrides to not collide with some odd driver implementations.
SH-2902 Fix for avatar bakes etc. getting garbage data sometimes.
SH-2729 Fix for horizontal line of glitching graphics when DoF enabled
SH-2719 Fix for lines in off-sim water
SH-2592 (OS X Lion) Graphics issues with Atmospheric Shaders enabled on Intel HD 3000, 10.7.2
Fix for Debug GL generating errors when changing graphics preferences (reloading shaders).
renamed add Friend to add Contact and MY FRIENDS to ACQUAINTANCES
added autohiding Topbar (Nav/Fav/Statusbar)
added disable left click touch & sit options from NaCl
added quit Viewer button to login again
added more german translations
add worldspace semi-random macro-dappling to scene to try to reintroduce low-freq lighting variation in leiu of global illumination
replaced Front with Top View
tweaked Graphics panel to be more simple
tweaked toolbar floater
tweaked avatar list name coloring and font style
removed Stop Animating me double
removed abillity to minimize Chatfloater
removed nearby chat menu entry and combination

2 comments:

  1. All very cool, but the "shoulder View" seems to be broken - can't change the settings (some, forget which).

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  2. i will release a fix for that soon , thanks for telling

    ReplyDelete