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Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.1.1 "Rolling Dragon"

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This Update took way longer than i wanted.


A lot of stuff happened since the last update, shortly after the last update my GPU began to show it's broken state more and more, with more games and applications simply crashing leading up to until a few days back when my GPU failed so hard that it started crashing even on my own Viewer and ultimately crashing so hard that it would lose the monitor signal and not recover from it, forcing me to hard reset. If it wasn't for my very generous brother who just so happened to gift me a new GPU early for my birthday which is on the 22rd this May, just in time as my GPU basically exploded.

RIP GTX 670.

You served me well for 6 years. You pulled through all those demanding games and showed everyone that big numbers aren't everything, it is sad to see you go due to a power supply unit failure. You made SL look so amazingly awesome on such a low-entry GPU and you managed 60 FPS too.

o7

Farewell old friend.



Now that we got this done... i'm now running on a shiny new GTX 1060. Needless to say that the framerates in SL have drastically improved...not. OFCOURSE NOT, as anticipated already. Getting roughly 10-33% more FPS but Screen Space Reflections can now be pushed all the way up to max, Depth of Field however still instantly burns it down to ashes.

Fine then, to the update then.

This update i finally got the login screen video redone and improved with the newly released full version of the song i used. (This was still done with my dying GTX 670). I think the new one is a much welcomed improvement but see it for yourself.



The full song can be found here if you're interested.



Next up is the sad announcement that i will not continue the customizable sidebar. Instead i will remove it for now. The reason for this is that i wasted multiple weeks trying to fix a big performance issue with the customization process without any success. Whenever you changed something in the sidebar it was rebuilt and added ontop of the previous built, hiding the old panels, this caused the sidebar to accumulate more and more invisible panels which had to be iterated through causing increasingly longer freezes as the Viewer was rebuilding the sidebar. I wanted to make it so it actually removes those panels but this caused a crash every single time and trying to fix it showed absolutely no success nor progress for 3 weeks. Since i can't continue trying to fix something and delay the update i chose to scrap the feature and instead focus on other things.

This brings me to the Poser which has gotten another round of some much needed improvements. Rotation orders are gone, rotations are much better, rotation sliders are bigger now for higher precision and compatibility with old saved poses is there too, the Motions and Animation tabs have had some improvements too, their lists will now properly show a scrollbar when really needed. Bone rotations should be properly interpolated now and shouldn't interpolate for too long for a snappier feeling.

Besides the poser getting some much needed extra love there are some changes all over the place, changelogs for instance are now hidden by default so you can enjoy the login video on your first start and the Avatar Render Settings tab has had some improvements too, you can now select multiple people and change all of their render settings at once via the new options menu button at the bottom right. Mass changing hurray!

I'm really sorry this update took so long. Viewer development should be back on track now and better than ever! However there's still one last thing to do very soon. Burn down my current Windows installation and do a clean new Windows installation, install all the necessary stuff to compile the Viewer and have a fresh, faster and better Windows than ever.

I'd like to use this chance to remind you that there exists a Discord Server where you can get help and share pictures. Quite some people have been sharing really nice pictures so far! Which reminds me, i made some more too.







Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.1.2 "Rolling Dragon"

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This is going to be just a tiny little update.


Mostly just crash fixes and under-the-hood improvements from Linden Labs. Nothing fancy to show off but if you find issues, particularly with IM delivery do tell me, they changed quite a bit there and i haven't had extended testing sessions yet.

As always a fair share of nice pics i did since the last time. (I still wish i could make the poser work on others... someday maybe.)


Make sure you hit that "Gear" icon and enable HD.






Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.1.3 "Selective Dragon"

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Another update, almost a month later.

I'm sorry this is taking so long lately, updates start out small and then something new happens and it carries me away completely. This time i just wanted to merge the latest LL code but found an interesting changes so i dug deeper and started playing with selection outlines which led me to make several doing this and testing a bit around took me a week alone.


So lets get right into the meat of this update.

First and foremost the biggest change you'll see is when you start selecting something, whether it is just right clicking something or opening edit/build and having a selection up, you'll most likely come across a mesh you'll select and you'll notice that the selection now looks completely different. With the latest code merges LL changed them because it was hard to work on alpha surfaces with media prims or something like that. I found this change very interesting and explored a few... alternatives on its look. I made 5 presets to choose from, Black Dragon being the new default.

Beacon of Light

Black Dragon

Wireframe

Dots

Linden Labs Default

Furthermore i found the culprit of the massive framerate drops when selecting something... especially Maitreya and Belleza bodies. The Viewer updates the selection transformations as fast as it can resulting in massive lag when unoptimized bodies such as Belleza come up with 1.7 million polygons. To lessen the impact i reduced the update interval to 5 seconds and added an option to toggle it off completely, you'll see selection outlines becoming desynced from the bodypart when they move, mostly when selecting other people's stuff, it should be fine on yourself though as your avatar stops dead in its tracks the moment you select yourself. I recommend keeping the updates on unless you are fine with selection outlines not matching up with rigged mesh. This improves performance infinitely. An example: with default as-fast-as-possible update rate i get ~0.2fps when selecting Belleza, with the new 5 second interval i get 8 fps with a 2-3 sec freeze every 5 seconds, with updates disabled i get the full 8 fps without freeze. That's a massive improvement. Here's an example on my Avatar.


Notice how selecting my avatar doesn't have a big impact on my framerate.

Then, with the help of one of my users as well as the working shader error messaging now i could find out which shader is preventing Intel GPU users from enabling Deferred Rendering. The faulty shader has been fixed and all limitations in the preferences panel have been lifted you should now be able to run the full feature palette Black Dragon has to offer, regardless of your GPU. HOOORAY!

The poser has gotten some improvements as well, mostly code improvements, performance improvements and cleanup, ontop of that it now has icons and folders to "group" and categorize bones into sections, this is to help people get an idea what joint/body part this weird name might be you're currently trying to edit. Tell me what you think.

The complexity window has gotten some major fixes, double clicking attachments in the list now selects them, this goes very well with the new improved selection outlines and performance improvements, triangle and vertice counts as well as the complexity numbers will no longer become unreadable when they go too high either, finally you can read that your 5 quadrillion polygons properly.

Lastly i want to mention an issue with pie menus that made them hard to use when using any other UI size than 1.0, this should be fixed now too.


Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.1.4 "Selective Dragon"

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A quick hotfix for the scale/rotation widgets being opaque in the latest update. Read the previous post for the rest of the changes.

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.1.5 "Selective Dragon"

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Another round of fixes.

This small quick-update fixes the selection outlines not looking as they should when Show Hidden Selections was disabled.

This update also fixes the "Tail" category name in the Poser missing as well as some weird behavior in the animator that made it refuse to work properly for some people, it also improves the control button handling, buttons should now enable/disable themselves properly whenever the right conditions are met.

Much thanks to Spiritus and Richard for helping me debug this weird animator issue.

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.1.6 "Selective Dragon"

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Time for a new update and some stuff i'd like to go over.

This time it will include a non-AVX version again.


For this update i've completely overhauled the entire Poser window again, i split it off from the Animation Manipulator (both are now separate menu entries and windows) and made some major changes in how you navigate the Poser, you'll notice 2 distinct new things in it, a big long button on the right, this will open both the pose list as well as the animator, both needed to create basic animations as before, now however they will replace the main layout. There's also a new button that when pressed will open the pose list separately and extend the window to the right, allowing you to save, load and make changes to poses quickly without having to navigate between tabs constantly. This change was made for the upcoming official implementation and i thought it would be a good idea to clean it up a bit when i'm splitting it off. Feedback is welcome.

I fixed two small issues reported to me, such as "High Precision Normals" not immediately taking effect and the Sky "East Angle" spinner not working properly, while doing so i fixed several tiny other things in those files as well and increased the precision you can control the "East Angle" with.

The rest is mostly just internal cleanup and preparation to bring the Poser into official which brings me to the next topic:


The Poser is going to Linden Labs. I've had a first meeting yesterday, we talked a few things through, talked about some problems and how to possibly fix them as well as some rough plans how to build on this feature in the future. The bad news is, as it stands now it doesn't look good for server side synchronization. This is a major bummer as it was number one reason to make it official in the first place, on top LL is also very interested in a proper export feature which will in turn bring its own set of new issues regarding permissions and the ability to copy/steal poses (not that they are worth anything anyway when everyone can just create them at any time anywhere). My biggest problem with the missing synchronization and added exporter is that it will look like a money grab to people and i'll basically the one on the chopping block for this. Don't get me wrong, i got no problem putting my head on a chopping block if i think its worth it (such as turning all pose makers against me because their poses are now useless now that everyone can create them easily). I don't want my head on a chopping block though if its just for the sake of making me look bad and that's what i feel this is going to end up in. People will be happy to hear the poser coming to official, then they will be sad and disappointed that it does not fix it's on flaw, that it's completely local, and instead i offer an exporter that makes you pay 10L$ every time you want to show a pose to someone, regardless of whether you are ever going to use it again or not, not to mention that the original goal of the poser, fixing misaligned and unfitting poses would ultimately be destroyed with the exporter feature. Why is this? The exporter requires some changes to the poser that will limit its usage depending on certain conditions, one way LL suggested would be checking all running animations and whether you got permissions for them, what sounds nice is actually a very very tricky and most likely already failed attempt at limiting the poser, checking all running animations for permissions and then disabling the exporter means you'd never ever be able to export at all, completely eliminating the export from the get go and thus eliminating any way to show a pose. Then my own suggestion was to put you into T pose, so in order to "copy" a pose you'd have to make it from scratch, that way it would be truly yours, even if it was exactly the same pose, you made it, it's yours, the problem with this approach is that it destroys the posers intend of giving you the ability to easily and quickly fix unfitting poses, it would be a disaster, you'd need to create a whole new pose when you were just trying to fix your current pose real quick. Imagine sitting on a chair and your legs and hands clip a bit, in order to fix this you'd have to recreate the entire pose from scratch, this is less than sub-optimal, this is horrible design and goes against what the poser is supposed to do. Besides, the exporter on a user perspective is a huge cash grab, every time you want to show your friend your pose, you'd have to upload it, 10L$, every time you make small adjustments, 10L$, every time you go to a club or any other place, sit down and fix up your pose you'd obviously want everyone to see it, 10L$, quickly you'd be paying 10L$ for every step you make and the poser would quickly be disregarded as a quick cash grab with a big flaw, in this case AnyPose would win and you'd still be required to pay 1000's of L$ for this tool to make rough poses.

I don't like this. I don't like this at all.

I made the poser to fix up broken or unfitting poses on the fly, i made it quickly accessible and easy to work with so anyone can do it with some time and patience. It's only flaw is the inability for others to see it and without doing some hacky Viewer-to-Viewer networking there is no way for me to achieve this, i absolutely NEED server side synchronization to make this work properly, the exporter is NOT an option, neither a replacement nor a workaround. It's an optional feature to expand upon the poser and use it for permanent content creation and content sharing.

A big issue with poses created with the poser is that it allows fine tuning any pose so much that you can create poses that are perfectly fitted for your very own avatar and possibly a very specific scene and position or even another Avatar, this pose is completely unique to you and this very situation, uploading it would be completely meaningless, no one else can use it because it does not fit them and even with the poser they wouldn't be able to fix it because the poser wouldn't allow re-uploading the pose again unless you gave permissions and lets be honest, in the current situation, who gives mod permissions today? No one. This is a HUGE issue.

I will definitely keep pushing server side synchronization, i will talk with the Lindens again about this but even if we get it we most likely won't get it in the first iteration, it will be a major project that is going to be something i'll be working on over time, i'll be pushing more updates, improvements, fixes and such as i test them out in my Viewer and as time passes on and new requests and feedback both from Linden Labs and other users come in. I sure hope this is worth it.

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.1.7 "Selective Dragon"

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Quickfix for 2 tiny reported annoyances.

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.1.8 "Repositioning Dragon"

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I've spend the last few days with Nat Linden to rework large parts of the Poser, tidying up code and making it nicer, faster, safer, smaller and more modern.

Besides a totally internally revamped Poser (as well as the Complexity and Animation Manipulation window) i spend some time getting the next big feature rolled into the Poser, POSITIONS. You heard that right, POSITIONS. You can now move all bones which support bone positions around in addition to rotating them. Obviously this means you can do a lot of silly stuff now, poses will also save positions now and old poses will be compatible BUT, if you move bones around and load a pose that does not have position info it will keep the last position info active, meaning if you put your legs on your face and load an old pose, don't expect the pose to undo it, you'll have to either undo it manually or by stopping the Poser.

Did i mention? Stopping the Poser now resets your skeleton and resetting bones is now split into 2 buttons, you can now reset rotation and position separately. Also rotation and position sliders have been split into 2 tabs to allow both of them to use the full width of the window for maximum precision when editing via dragging!

I suppose you expect a silly picture now.


Here goes.

In case you're wondering how much of the poser code was changed...


All the green lines are changed codelines.

Also in case you missed it, i made a video to showcase the new poser for Linden Labs. It goes without saying that now with the position possibility it's already outdated again.... this is why i didn't make a new one all this time...ohwell...



You'll have some fun with it... and oh... don't press the big red..*explosions* oh... *more explosions*.. oh...uhm... well the advice may be too late for that eager guy over there but not too late for you, please don't press the big red button with the big white skull on it. No seriously, you don't want to be THAT guy...what? that one guy... the one who just exploded. Yea that guy, you don't want to be THAT guy.

Also, i'd like to remind you again that there's a discord channel and some users have been posting excellent pictures, a special shoutout to Beev Fallen who has made some absolutely stunning stuff with materials! You can also get help there much easier too.

Another thing i'd like to say is a big thank you to all those that continue supporting me via Patreon and of course everyone who has done so in the past. You're awesome!

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.1.9 "Falling Dragon"

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A dragon never sleeps. Unless it sleeps.



Continuing on last update's work this update brings another bunch of improvements for the Poser, specifically it's animator feature.

The animator was always kinda... not very persistent, the moment the window was hidden the animator stopped working, that's because the main loop for the animator was written into the draw call for the window as it is the only call that was periodically called, problem was that as soon as the window didn't call the draw call anymore, such as when the UI is hidden or when it was closed the animator would stop... animating. Bummer.

NOT ANYMORE! BEGONE DRAW CALL NESTED ANIMATOR! I separated the animator from the main window's code and made it its own thing that can be called from anywhere in the code. This means the animator will now persist beyond the existence of the very window that houses its UI, this is especially useful if you want to ... well record your animations without the UI. Now you can! To show it off i made the very first fully-UI-less animator animation, no edits, no hacks, no tricks! It's 100% made inside the Poser.

I used the magic of the internet and put some fitting music to it as well!

You can see the version with sound here


That uh... well that's pretty much it already but i made a few more nice pictures for you!




Animator and what to do with it...

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I've been hard at experimenting again and i'm digging up some interesting things that got me some interesting ideas.

What if i told you that it would be possible to make a UI for a full animation editor, like QAvimator inside SL? Technically you could take any animation that is running, read it out and fill the UI with all necessary information, keyframes, rotations, positions, time values and allow you to edit them, fully, imagine you could edit a running animation, move around its keyframes, change rotations and positions not only would this be the ultimate and only animation editor inside Second Life, it would also give mod permissions on animations a right to exist.

Making a functional and sensible UI for this is probably the biggest challenge of this. Not only would it require a lot of time to build, it would also require a lot of time to test and make it functional, fill it with features that are needed to make working with it as easy as possible.

Being able to fully edit running animations...

How would it look... how would it work... would this even be worth making?


Who knows. Maybe i'll get around to do it, it would help immensely getting the exporter up and working.

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.2.0 "Falling Dragon"

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Update time.


This time with more falling dragons!

Dragons fly you say? Not today!


Last week i made some much needed improvements to the animator, this week i'm finetuning and fixing more tiny things here and there.

Most importantly clicking the "Play" button too early (when the list is empty) shouldn't crash the Viewer anymore, in fact you won't even be able to click it anymore until you add at least one step.

Also in the poser you can now move the pelvis further around, 20 units rather than just 5 units, this was necessary for my latest video as well as something completely new...

...something i wanted for quite a while and you can finally do it, the camera floater now has a dropdown in its "camera modes" tab in which you can select any of your 134 bones to force the camera to follow it based on your current camera preset's offset, i added it now because again it was absolutely crucial for the video i was making.


You'll probably remember the falling scene i made last week, i extended it twice, all the way down to the ground. Poor draegn is ded.

This update also brings the Viewer on par with the Second Life Viewer 5.1.7, the latest official release again, almost fully untested of course, if you find any bugs or issues report them and i'll see what i can do to get them fixed as soon as possible (like the above mentioned play crash).




Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.2.2 "Caring Dragon"

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This update comes with a whole host of improvements all around.


Chat, Camera, General and Privacy tabs in preferences have been revamped for increased consistency in the layout and looks of all preferences panels. The joystick/flycam configuration window has been totally redone too!
old (left) | new (right)
new (left) | old (right)

Lots of warnings fixed, code and files cleaned up and defunct options and widgets remove.

Also the biggest addition is the ability (finally) to change permissions via the friendlist either via the menu at the top or the gear menu... or the right click menu... speaking of right click menu, you can also change the permissions in ANY right click menu now. Awesome. Please note that permissions will not update in your friendlist unless you force them to (untick view permissions and then retick it), i swear i tried automating it the last 3 days without success... idk why it doesn't work but hey, it doesn't refresh via webprofiles either, nor does in the LL Viewer.

Screen Space Reflections have been slightly improved and they should no longer vanish in closed rooms on certain surfaces depending on the camera angle.

Besides these, lots of small improvements have been added and bugs have been fixed all over the place such as the texture selection that should work again, selecting "cancel" in the color picker will no longer revert to 0 alpha, highhlighting transparent will no longer lock your depth of field focus and hiding your UI will no longer break looking up and down via left or right-click drag, speaking of, right click-drag now works with the UI hidden too! Miniprofiles have had their look improved and your own dot on the minimap is now colored blue by default.


MOST IMPORTANTLY: Opening tabs in preferences will now change the "+" icon to a "-" icon. WOW. Mind blown.




I hope you like it.

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.2.3 "Caring Dragon"

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Another update, a bit later than i wanted but it contains some extra to make up for it.


It's mostly fixes again to work down my long list of todo's which seemingly gets longer every day rather than shorter.

Besides fixing the broken group chat behavior options, a crash when trying to toggle borderless window mode off while in login screen, enter key not working properly in keybinding dialogs among some other minor things this update comes with a revamped Media-on-a-Prim floater.


Also new are buttons to invert values easily, they have been added to the flycam configuration window as seen below:


I've also added a button to lock an array of sliders and move all sliders at once. You'll find these lock buttons in preferences - display mainly, it allows locking shadow resolution for instance and changing all shadow resolutions at the same time if that's your thing. It's really just a tiny QoL thing.

This update also brings the Viewer up to snuff with the latest LL Release, meaning snapshot saving is now multithreaded too among some other things, no more freezing SL while you are choosing a folder to save your snapshots in. In the future i'll use it for my animation window too.

If something is unexpectedly broken, report it to me, this version is almost untested besides a quick snapshot test to make sure LL's snapshot changes didn't break the most important feature of my Viewer.

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.2.4 "Caring Dragon"

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Quick! Take this release and run.

RUN! RUN BEFORE THIS MANIAC DECIDES TO CHANGE MORE THINGS AND EVERYTHING BREAKS AGAIN! RUUUUUUUUUUUUN!



This update took way longer than i wanted. Games kept sidetracking me, friends kept sidetracking me, family kept sidetracking me, then cool new stuff happened and it needed fixing then i wanted to pack up and just do this very tiny little change to top it off and everything broke... and this went on and on...but finally, here it is, in all its broken glory!

The main topic of this update was UI IMPROVEMENTS.

You'll find (but not notice) that the UI learned a few new handy tricks so let me give you a quick rundown what is new.

  • Right Clicking while dragging a slider will "cancel" out of the drag.
  • Right Clicking on a slider will revert it to its previous value if it had one.
  • Right Clicking on a slider, spinner, button or checkbox while holding CTRL and Shift will revert it to its default value IF it is linked to a debug setting.
  • Using the Scrollwheel while holding CTRL while hovering over a slider or spinner allows "scrolling" through values.
  • Holding Shift in addition to the above will scroll faster (times ten).
  • Clicking anywhere near the slider thumb will now center the mouse on it rather than instantly snapping the thumb to the mouse and changing the value, possibly causing a lot of hair-pulling. (Yup that's why i'm a naked dragon)
  • Pressing up or down arrow while a slider is selected now allows changing its increment value up and down respectively. There is currently no display to show you what it currently is set to.
  • Tools Floater - Texture tab sliders will now delay applying their value to prevent them from jittering all over the place because they constantly get resynced with the server and possibly ending up not the value you last set them to (e.g reverting back to previous values). This is not a perfect fix but it will massively reduce the hammering on the server when changing values and will combat this laggy behavior pretty good.
These are just the general UI widget additions. There's more! Loadingscreen has 2 new tips to mention two of the above new features too.

Both derender in nearby and adding friends is now multi-select, you can now mass invite everyone as friend....or mass derender everyone, the choice is yours.

"Show Original" in appearance will finally switch your inventory tab back to the main tab when it has to making it actually 200% more useful.

Some warnings to several options like the pie menu (action wheel), custom ports and others have been added to inform the user that using these will cause issues.

Lots of cleanup, layout consistency fixes, padding fixes, icon changes, scaling fixes and generally a lot of facelifting has been done across several panels all over the UI to ensure a more consistent look where i touched the UI.

HUDs taking control over the camera should now work properly again.

3 new people have been added to the Patreon list, thanks Nyt, Luke and Menominum!

The layout of the texture console has been overhauled again completely, wider bars, better spacing, consistency, consistency and more consistency, you can actually fucking look at it again and read it!


But wait, that's not all! The Viewer has been updated with the very latest code from LL and has had the maintenance fixes applied too, this includes a fix for rigged alpha masked/blending mesh shadows being rendered wrong, i waited years for them to fix it and here it is, FINALLY! The ONA Sergal finally looks as good as it was supposed to long ago!


Here's an example of the issue i reported over 4 years ago! Here is the original Jira


What a time to be alive!



via Gfycat

It's not over yet. I did change a few things on this blog as well, firstly and most importantly i added the bug tracker, you can see what i'm working on, which bugs i'm aware of, what features i have planned and which are already done/fixed. You can find it in the right sidebar. Further i changed the pre-download page to link the all "Guide" posts I've written, they are most likely more useful than the old posts i had linked there.

I've also separated the picture channel in Discord to differentiate between photo-shopped pictures and raw pictures, this is an effort to maybe feature unedited, raw pictures of users other than me on my blog. I stand for unedited pictures with my name and Viewer and i don't tolerate photo-shopped pictures ESPECIALLY not as promotion material for my Viewer, people are meant to see what the Viewer is truly capable of, now what you can do in Photoshop. I highly recommend taking a look at the pictures channel in my Discord Server, there are some truly awesome shots in there!

Also i'd like to thank all Patreon patrons again for their support, you rock!

One last thing, this update contains a bug that will sometimes render one ore more rigged attachments of other people on your HUD usually just until they are fully loaded, so far its rare and i don't know if its just me, so if you see it, DO REPORT it to me... i mean i'll investigate it regardless but just so you know i'm aware of it, if nothing helps do a relog but usually it should solve itself after a bit.

As always, report issues if you find them, i'll investigate them as soon as i can.

(Also WOW, dem downloads)


Enjoy some pictures, see you next time hopefully with pictures from others too!



Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.2.5 "Caring Dragon"

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After last update's uproar about UI changes i thought i'd do something different this time around.

JK

This is another UI update.



But rather than listing everything i've done i'll just give you a few pictures and get onto the rest after that.


New online/offline notification look


Snapshot window shows the save path


Fancier voice volume popups

Lots of other stupid stuff you'll yell at me for, like fixed readability in text editors (specifically About Land and Landmark editing), some text changes and little cleanups here and there.

What is much more important however is the new Automatic Memory Management which by default is enabled, i want you to test it out and give me some feedback. What it does: It checks how much memory is used for Scene/System memory and automatically sets the limit for them as high as needed + some extra, meaning whenever you need more it will automatically set the limit higher and will also lower it again when you need less. This should reduce any performance impact large memory limits have to a minimum (if they still have one like they had before 64bit). I've also used this chance to make a few experimental changes to allow setting the limits up to 3984mb, making a total of roughly 8gb to be used. I'm sure you'll never hit these (you'll have a hard time hitting 2gb even). All i can say is i had to enable Full Resolution Textures to fill my whole 6gb of VRAM, without crashing or slowing down that is. You wanted more memory usable in SL? You got it. You can disable the automatic management if you think it's causing you issues or if you want to do it manually. Just note that on AMD it knows no limits, i still cannot read AMD GPU memory values so i can't find out how much VRAM your GPU has and thus cannot limit it accordingly, be mindful of that.

Another very controversial change is complexity. Yup i changed it again, i dropped the "divide by 10 to make numbers readable" and dropped the impact of simple polygons but raised the impact of rigged mesh. You'll see higher numbers for sure, my own av complexities roughly doubled but altogether you'll most likely see most people getting jellydolled anyway so not much change here, you might just have to adjust your max complexity a bit up. I raised the default from 125k to 150k, measuring against my own avatars (50k-110k) this seems like a good number for near perfectly optimized all the way down to slightly above "okayish" without letting in the "okayish" and below avatars. I'll keep an eye on complexity, i'll probably readjust it again, probably lower the impact if simple triangles a bit more to crunch big numbers a bit more down but besides big numbers it seems to do it's job well at jellydolling avatars i really don't want to waste my resources on. I also did some fixing to the calculations so the one in the complexity floater and the inworld display match and both count everything properly... inworld display didn't count the root prim's triangles for instance (ouch), so expect to see even higher triangle counts now.


Knotty Beach really isn't a good place to show complexity but you'll see what i mean with huge triangle counts, people there are the worst. Red numbers everywhere and triangle counts starting at the range of entire levels + NPC's in triple A titles. The whole scene was ~20 million triangles, that's simply insane.

Before i'll leave you with this new update, there's a new slider to control the global brightness of all light sources in the world.

And now, the first ever pictures on my blog from other people. These are coming straight from the Black Dragon Discord channel.

By SpiritusNatus

By Beev Fallen

By SpiritusNatus


Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.2.6 "Caring Dragon"

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A small bugfix update.

Readability fixes, poser fixes and shadow distance adjustements. Windows 10 startup problems caused by outdated dll's should be fixed too.

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.2.7 "Caring Dragon"

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Another small batch of changes. Most noticeably the online/offline notifications in IM should again show "is Online" or "is Offline" while normal notifications wont.

Also triangle impact in complexity has been lowered a little bit more. Shouldn't make a big difference for most mesh avatars since they are rigged and rigged complexity values will still explode as they are supposed to.

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.2.8 "Caring Dragon"

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Another update focused on improvements. Mainly fixing leftover issues and improving the UI where i can.

Complexity has been altered again, it should be even lower now because rigged mesh was calculated twice (woops) but don't think you'll magically get below those 5 quadrillion complexity of yours. No way. Once unoptimized, always unoptimized.

Your GPU name and memory usage will now be shown in preferences so you don't have to fiddle with the texture console to see it.



Motion Blur Amount and Automatic Shadow Distance should be persistent across logins now.

And several fixes to camera behavior have been done, camera rolling will now work when sitting while Cinematic Headtracking is enabled, there are two options one to configure the amount of roll while sitting with Cinematic Headtracking and another to disable avatar-based rolling while sitting. Note that disabling avatar based rolling still allows rolling when Cinematic Headtracking is enabled and configured to allow full rolling and vise versa. Headtracking roll is added on top of avatar-based roll and avatar-based roll is mainly for non-Cinematic Headtracking use.

Advanced Complexity Information has been overhauled for the new complexity calculations and should now give much clearer information on which attachments and specifically what features of it cost how much complexity.


I think i'll slowly start focusing on bigger stuff again now that i have a solid base again.


By Billy Daxter

By Jethro

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.3.0 "Animating Dragon"

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The age of animesh has come.

I was bored and didn't know what to do a friend asked me about helping him to merge animesh into Firestorm and get it up and running so when he was done with that i thought i could start doing it too, i mean why not. It's a RC now and should hit live this or next week.

So here we are. Animesh fully supported now in Black Dragon as you can see below.



Expect me to make some music videos with this at some point.

I didn't just implement animesh however, i did the usual bugfixing and improvements too, namely the Animation Control window and the Advanced Complexity Information window both support animated meshes. Yes you can stop, freeze, slow-down, speed-up and copy and paste animations from and onto them. Since they are just objects i see no reason LL would not allow me to allow you to do whatever the heck you want with them. The poser however does not support animated mesh YET. This is the next thing i'm going to work on in addition to some nice extra features for animated mesh, such as copying your shape and attachments to them. Animated mesh as it is right now does not support neither, they won't have attachments and their shape cannot be changed, i plan on changing that. (Really LL? you didn't think of adding a "copy your shape item in the animesh object and have it applied" feature? This is a total no-brainer) If attachments work anything like i imagine them to work and if what i plan to do works you'll be able to copy both your shape and attachments onto them, this is only locally (as you'd expect) and is mainly to allow me to make my music videos as planned... with myself. HAHA.

Complexity was changed a bit with the introduction of animesh but don't worry, as always i don't give a flying fuck about it and changed it to match the complexity calculations as before with the exception that animesh is now included and does reduce the complexity value by 5% since an animesh avatar is not a full avatar and thus shouldn't be treated as such with a minor complexity discount, not that it matters really, all animesh objects cannot be shitty meshes anyway, they must be somewhat low poly and if you're going to wear it you'll have lots of high complexity pieces which will do the rest anyway regardless of what the animesh object does.

Also in order to do something for better FPS i went ahead and refactored large parts of the joystick idle/working calculations and eliminated all settings lookups, this is a massive improvement and essentially means no more FPS drops while having any kind of joystick plugged in and "enabled". This should make using them a bit smoother and generally squeeze out a few more FPS (depending on how much you already got) for those sweet 60 FPS you want while recording your videos.



I'm sure you'll appreciate the changes. From what i could test it netted me roughly 20 FPS when 100 where the base framerate and while using it (as shown above) i didn't notice any unusual or permanent framerate hits. As always if you find anything not working do tell me so i can get it fixed ASAP.

Besides above mentioned things there were a few tiny changes, left clicking on objects while the About Land window is open should no longer deselect land but rather now select parcels properly (yay) and the rest is mostly just merge-caused issues that were resolved.

Also thanks again for all your continued support, Patrons and non-Patrons alike. Without you i hardly wouldn't feel the need to push further.

As always a picture from me and a few from others from Discord.




By Liaranne

By 털덩이

By macronomicus

Black Dragon 64x - Update 3.3.1 "Animating Dragon"

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Ahhh, after some good productive development there's finally another update.



Not only does this update rework the poser a lot, finally adding bone scaling to all bones, it also adds support for collision volumes and attachment bones! Wow. As always, if you find bugs report them to me.


I've also spent some time to add a feature to copy your shape to animesh objects as well as move your selected attachments to the targeted animesh object via the Animation Controls. This will allow you to do things like this:



But be warned though, moving attachments will prime the Viewer for a crash. Make sure you wear everything you want to send over first before attempting this, altering your outfit in any way will cause a crash, a logout might also cause a crash as well... just like a teleport... this is HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL, use with care.

Besides all this posing nonsense i've also tracked down the cause for the huge performance decrease with avatars around, i think i don't need to mention that i fixed it and framerates should once again be as they were before. Boy this stuff dropped me from 30 to 1-4 FPS...

Reset skeleton has also been fixed, hooray and the Viewer has been once again updated to the very latest code from LL. Have fun.

By Spiritus


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