Black Dragon Beta

NOTE: DO NOT, NEVER, EVER, WHATEVER YOU DO, CLOSE THE NEARBY CHAT UNTIL I MADE IT PROPERLY HANDLE IT!

phew.

A whole weekend of nonstop coding and hacking and cracking and hammering and... you know... generally tearing CHUI apart is finally ready to try out!

This beta is ONLY a preview and is ONLY meant to show what i'm doing with CHUI right now and how it will be (most likely) implemented into my new Viewer. So... feedback needed.

Old Viewer is still available via normal download link, this Viewer has a whole new Project Page therefor a whole new Download section and should prevent you from accidentally downloading this Viewer instead of the original one.

NOTE: Try out the ORIGINAL CHUI from LL first, you have to know how the original one was before you can say what is better and what isnt (obviously). You can find CHUI in LL Release or Beta Viewer. I HAVE DONE NOTHING ELSE THAN MODDING CHUI IN THIS RELEASE! DONT EXPECT A FINISHED VIEWER!!!!

I suggest you to layout CHUI like this for an ideal space usage and a pre-CHUI behavior.

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Nirans Viewer <-> Black Dragon

I'm in a very good mood for some reason, don't ask me why, i know that it won't stay for too long but i want to talk a bit about my plans, they are huge!

Nirans Viewer will be no more...

Soon. (aprox. 30 weekly Betas from here) 2.5.0 will be the final Release this Viewer will officially see, after which i will continue privately (because otherwise i would have to use another Viewer), not sure if i will ever make them available for the public again, the source however will and must stay available to everyone, that means everyone who feels the need to do so can just compile my latest code (which will ofcourse get updates because i love pushing stuff to bitbucket =3). How long will it be until then you may ask... aprox. 30 more Betas of which each is released weekly, 30 more weeks to go, thats still more than half a year and i'm not even sure if i can afford this time so this might change.

So why am i saying that the Viewer won't be anymore but at the same time i say there will be still 30 more Betas? Because the Viewer as you know it right now will not be continued anymore due to several reasons...

1. CHUI.

2. Random FPS drops in Deferred (for me and some other people)

3. I want to redo alot parts of the Viewer.

The Viewer as it is now was always build for minimalistic needs and maximum effectiveness aswell as minimastic but still fancy UI design, while LL continued to waste 600x800 pixel per window on your screen, i was minimizing space wastage, that worked pretty well but right now i'm totally sick of it. Minimalistic UI design also means alot of limits and i hate limits because limits are in some cases just stupid and unnecessary!

<-> Black Dragon???

Black Dragon will be the new name, no more Nirans Viewer, it sounds selfish and stupid, it also reminds me of a certain guy...

So, what am i going to do with it? Alot. I will redo the whole main UI and with it probably revisit every damn floater to work with the new planned style, thats alot work and will take probably several weeks but i dont care, i want something truly different, something no one would ever do (most of my old stuff wasnt done by anyone else too...but, it was just... a game, a little game, a piece of what can be done with the UI and i want more, not just one piece, i want ALL OF THEM :)

User Interface redesign ideas...

This is a work in progress UI redesign, im extremly happy that most stuff works as intended right now, the right upper part will make problems however. This is mostly static, the buttons at the top left and below the navigationbar are all unmovable and unhidable but honestly i dont care, really. It looks better with them and it still wastes less space than... fuck this, i dont care about space anymore!

Next topic on my list are the "Achievements", YES ACHIEVEMENTS, i implemented them long ago but some of them were broken, they didnt tell you when you finished one and the achievement floater simply looked....simple...i'm going to change that, i will make every achievement repeatable, they will award points and they will notify you when you finished one (hopefully). Coupled with a RLVa-like system those points could be used in a inworld store from me to get some cool stuff...or...they could be just e-peen extensions.

CHUI. Yes i know what you think... but you said "I will never ever implement this piece of shit.". Yes, but i have to, no way around it. Coding a way around it is something Firestorm can do, but not me, i dont have time, will and or knowledge to recode literally the whole chatsystem to work like the old V2 system and still include all the new stuff of CHUI, i will simply bash it in and make it work better... as good as i can.

Preferences floater and the panel as it is right now are both somewhat a huge mess, the floater doesnt offer enough space without doing dozens of ugly tabs and the panel right now doesnt quite work like it does in games because SL's User Interface scaling works totally differently than that of games, therefor i will totally redo it and mash it all into the sidebar, yes, you heard right, a sidebar just for preferences! It will ofcourse always open the graphics panel by default because it should somewhat stay a machinima sidebar. 

Explain ALL THE THINGS!

After the Viewer reaches a somewhat "finished" state i will start to do a huge "Walkthrough" for my Viewer that will explain all the things, why is X there, why is Y not there and what does Z? Hopefully everything will be answered. It will contain bugs and their solutions if there are any. It will also contain pictures, lots of them... comparison shots and explanation pictures.

Topbar, Toolbars and no Toolbelts...

As you might have noticed in snapshots above i'm going to throw out the old cloud and topbar design and replace it with something hexagony (what a word...), toolbars left and right will work just as before, top and bottom will probably get a double toolbar which allows them to have those "connected" hexagon buttons with offset, not sure yet tho, will have to see how it turns out. I also kind of grew sick of having to iterate 3 different files to make changes to the topbar, i will simply combine it all into one single file, this should make things alot easier.

I might also do reimplement the autohide function and extend it a bit, make it fancier maybe. I want shit to blow minds!

Misc informations...

The new Viewer will include and exclude pretty much everything it does now, RLVa, SSB, pie menus, lots of customisations, tons of graphical fancyness and soon also CHUI and Materials, i will want to make the last release a nuke, not just a bomb.

FEAR ME SL VIEWER AS I WILL TORTURE YOU *SQUEAK*

2.2.0b (2701)

So... i hope this will be the last Alpha for now...


All i did for this Alpha was merging up the rest of SSB and some additional fixes not even FS has at least not yet visible in their public repository :P

Anyway, SSB works fine now, i can switch outfits as much as i want and they will bake extremly quick, it might take a few seconds sometimes, dont be scared.

I tested both Hippo Hollow which is (Second Life RC BlueSteel 13.05.04.275247) and i tested Hazzlehoff, my favorite emergency place which is using (Second Life Server 13.04.29.274986), both of them were baking my Avatar just fine. I just dont know if its visible to others aswell heh... havnt had anyone checking my Avatar all the time but i didnt hear any complains when i was near people... so... i guess its fine.

I also added the much requested Land Info quick button back (temporarly until i implemented it into the navbar itself), you can either right click and enable it or go to Preferences to do so.

Note: This Alpha was not even intended to contain anything else than JUST merging up the rest of RLVa/SSB. I got plans on what im going to do next, i will explain them in the Beta post.

Snapshots:

Sorry, no super special ones, they will be shown on Beta post :P

And yes, this is real shader based greyscale :P, lights are the interesting part about it, they make stuff around them colorfull again as you can see in the last snapshot.

DOWNLOAD

Changelog:

2.2.0b Alpha

added land info quickbutton to statusbar

merged SSB

fixed alot cases in which avatar wouldnt bake

cleaned up code a bit and tagged some things that needed it

Alpha 2.2.0a (2692)

Notes:

Clean your settings and cache MANUALLY outside of Second Life if you get any problems (as usual). Ask your Google if you dont know how.

Loading old presets or using old settings WILL result in your topbar beeing invisible! Enable Autohide Topbar and disable it again to fix this.


Feedback, gimme gimme.

Report anything unusual, may it be flying pigs, green purple or purple green.

Please dont forget to collect your logs when you crash because "im crashing more than in previous versions" doesnt help me, i can only guess its because of 2 things, either SSB/RLVa merge or you having lots of disconnects (maybe caused by the first reason) which results in a crash.

Anyway, short update on what has been done, i fixed alot of your complains (see below), made everything look better (hopefully) and did some cleanup and general UI uplifting everywhere. Next one might be a beta again, depending on if i will continue merging up SSB for the next update or not.

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Have a snapshot as excuse for not doing long blogposts explaining the changes.

Changelog:

2.2.0a Alpha

fixed Search in statusbar not working
fixed Home button in statusbar not working
fixed the topbar beeing hidden right from the beginning with clean setting
fixed the statistic bars for the new cloudbar layout
fixed draw distance panel not appearing right below the draw distance icon
fixed default shape differing from LL one
fixed the high precision sliders and camera preset spinners not refreshing after loading a settings preset
added option to hide IM/Group chiclets
added my partial OPEN-162 changes again
added explanations to the auto visual-mute and derender functions
added default indicators to high precision panel
added option to enable/disable the cloudbar style (not yet functional)
added 2 new loadingscreens
removed Quick Land option from UI Customisation panel
removed OpenGL Compatibility option
removed Vertex Array Objects option
removed Old memory profiling option
removed Vertical Build Floater option
changed Chat/IM/Group toasts to better match the cloudbar style
changed the Machinima Sidebar to better match the cloudbar style and prevent it from overlapping with it
changed Blur on Distance increment value to 0.01 for more finetuning
changed and tweaked some labels in UI Customisation for a better look and nicer explanation of what they do
changed, fixed and aligned the old default indicators in lighting and deferred panel to match the high precision ones
changed info button textures to match the cloudbar style
tweaked the hiding behavior of the topbar backgrounds so they wont stay visible when we hide the cloudbar
tweaked old-style topinfo bar for a better look
tweaked favorites >>/<< button size
tweaked topbar sliding behaviors a bit
cleaned up some topbar code

Nirans Viewer 2.2.0 Alpha (2656)

Note:

Make sure you clear settings and cache if problems arise, as usual.


So this is a alpha which is very important as it contains the feared update SSB (Server Side Baking), RLVa is fixed for SSB and should work mostly, i havnt tested SSB yet however and thats exactly what i need.

I need alot of tests and feedback about:

Does RLVa work as intended?
Do you crash more often because of SSB or on SSB enabled SIMs (dont forget the crashlogs)?
How do you like the new topbar (Cloudbar)?
-should it be default, should it be removed, what could be changed etc etc
What do you think about the improved autohiding topbar feature in combination with that new Cloudbar?
Does everything else work as intended?

...and so on. Comment.

btw, no long blogpost until "full" beta release.

DOWNLOAD (Windows)

Changelog:

2.2.0 Alpha

fixed Names of other participants not appearing with Display Names off and Plain Text Chat History on
fixed Glow Lum/Warmth Weight sliders in Lighting panel not working
fixed a long standing issue in all Viewers that causes the TP screen to appear when we TP home while beeing home already
fixed llpaneldrawdistance.cpp/h missing from Cmake
fixed changing keylayouts causing unchanged buttons to keep their function (Q and X)
reenabled the locationinputctrl warning (will have to find another way to fix it)
redesigned chatfloater
redesigned the combined topbar, now called cloudbar
rewritten the whole topbar autohide code to remember our favoritebar correctly even on disabling the feature
reverted the avatar_lad.xml to LL one (temporarly)
moved Machinima Sidebar button to the right now that the Sidebar pushes the UI by default
merged Server Side Baking basic functionality
merged RLVa for Server Side Baking
changed Tone Mapping defaults slightly for more color contrast
changed llpaneldrawdistance to nvpaneldrawdistance, MINE!
changed ShowSelectionBeam to control if our editing arm motion is played
changed RenderShadowBlurDistFactor to 0.08 by default to prevent shadows from becoming blurrier over distance
changed more notifications and offers to aquaintances/contacts
changed and improved loadingbar background scaling a bit
changed AFK timeout to unlimited by default (again)
cleaned up some comments and unneeded code bits
cleaned up and removed some files
cleaned up alot of tags and added more tagging/commenting on some functions
removed lots of help_topic tags in XML (we dont use the internal help)
removed alot of gamma correction bits and all kind of options for it
removed help and fix button strings (both unused)
removed unused HTML files and folder in skins folder
removed preferences floater XMLs
removed some unneeded icons/textures

Recent thoughts...

Recently i have been busy with thinking instead of working, i came to the conclusion that something has to be changed in the Interface again. This time i'm thinking about the main User Interface layout which was the default since this Viewer was started. It includes the Statusbar, Navigationbar, Favoritebar, Toolbars, Chiclets, Chatbar, Main Menus and Chat/IM Toast placement.

So...what is it what i want to change on these? They were perfectly fine and designed to take as less space as possible while making the most use of the available space. Well...let me compile some things together...

First off, i wanted to get rid of the whole Status/Navigation/Favoritebar as one, then remove all widgets up there, throw out the Search, Clock, Favorites and the Quickbuttons aswell as the FPS count, they will be reimplemented later. The Navigationbar will be centered, torn off from everything else at the top most place. The main menu will probably stay at the left side, below it there should be a button to slide out favorites. The right side will feature the stats packed together, which would be the Clock, Network Statistics and your FPS, a seperate part will be for your money and below it there will be the Media/Draw Distance/Sound buttons. Last but not least the Quickbuttons will probably moved below the Navigationbar part and those next/previous/home buttons will remain on the left side just like in any browser. Not sure how or where to implement the search right now...

Second major thing i wanted to change is the Toolbars, Toolbars are the areas in which you can place your buttons freely, i wanted to move the bottom one to top, place it aside of the top one and make the top one align left and the bottom one align right, no bottom buttons anymore, the bottom should be totally button free. This habit of having buttons at the bottom is old and annoying, buttons dont belong at the bottom where your character or avatar is centered at camera wise. In other words they overlay your avatar and thats not the point of them, they should not overlay the "important" part of your world rendering.

Third and last major thing i want to change is the whole Chat layout, i want to make the Chatbar fixed at the bottom left, show/hidable via the Chatbutton or Enter, Chat toasts should be more simple, less fancy looking and in generally a bit smaller and more transparent, same for the Chatbar and History, both should be more simple, no floater background, just a black slightly transparent background, plain simple and still providing some look into the world behind it without making it unreadable. Only thing that probably wont be changed much here is the IM system itself aswell as its chiclets, they are totally fine and should absolutely remain there.

What do you think about this idea about redesigning the whole main UI area?

Beta 2.1.6 (2600)

I hope you were tricked much on 1. April =3

User Interface:

I was bored and needed something to do because i wanted to do a new release but somehow...there wasnt enough to show... so i made myself some work and replaced the draw distance slider in the navigation bar with a icon, hover your mouse over it and you will be able to set your draw distance there, in the same move i also removed all options of it, that means you cannot hide this icon, its always there and you wont need to hide it anyway...its small

I also added an avatar count to the world map SIM names, which will also take you into account.

There were some other changes like a fix that made RenderResolutionDivisor stay over logins, which means that if you had Preferences open and logged out, next time you log in everything was still blurry, apart from that i fixed that bold,italic and underlined texts were SLURLs leading nowhere.

I cleaned up some files and removed some unnecessary and none-working functions like the Navbar Layer 2,3 and 4 and removed some files linked to the volume pulldown which doesnt exist in my Viewer anymore.

Server Side AO:

I've implemented all the new LSL commands for the upcomming server side AO changes, they will allow you to replace the animations directly on the server, that means, less lag for everyone, faster reaction times of AOs AND you only need to activate it once (wear it) and then you can just detach it again for the whole login session, right now you have to redo that every login but LL is working on making that stick over logins.
The new commands are:
llSetAnimationOverride
llGetAnimationOverride 
llResetAnimationOverride
PERMISSION_OVERRIDE_ANIMATIONS

Snapshots:

DOWNLOAD

enjoy,
Niran

Changelog:

2.1.6

added new llSetAnimationOverride,llGetAnimationOverride and llResetAnimationOverride functions
added new PERMISSION_OVERRIDE_ANIMATIONS permission to keywords.ini
added avatar count to world map region name
added a draw distance slider hover icon that allows you to set the draw distance (small binoculars icon)
fixed RenderResolutionDivisor staying after relog, also fixes background blurring staying active
fixed and implemented some missed Intel HD Card shader compile and rendering fixes
fixed underlined/bold/italic styled texts beeing SLURL links
fixed rightclick land/build not opening the right panel/opening 2 panels at the same time in tools floater
removed the draw distance slider from navbar
removed Navbar Layer 2,3 and 4 options aswell as debugs
removed all Draw Distance slider debugs, there is no need to hide it anymore
removed unused volume pulldown code and files
cleaned up some xml files

Beta 2.1.5 (2585)

NOTE: i quickly fixed the world map controls not following resizing, if its annoying you, redownload, i reuploaded a fixed package

Back on track with some cool new stuff.
Btw i fixed that nasty random startup crash caused by the WatchdogEnabled debug! You should be safely able to clear your settings again if necessary.

User Interface:

The IM control panels have been revamped internally and their layout were also fixed for the darkness skin so the slide button wont slide half out of the window, its glowing will also not be cut anymore.

I've removed the ability to switch skins AND i've removed all skins and textures for now, that means the Viewer got about 12mb smaller again, a bit more and we can finally upload that package to VirusTotal for all those security freaks out there!

Double clicking an object or clothing part will now add it instead of replacing (just wearing) it, that means wohoo now stop annoying me with that feature request. *still right click adds stuff*

Chat:

The sculpt map and stitching type options in my build floater have been moved into the floater and were aligned with the rest, i also used that opportunity to start aligning the other widgets a bit and i will probably continue aligning everything else in future.

there are no words needed here:

how does it work? It works like html tags, you write start one of those new tags, write your text and then end it with the close tag, need an example?
write < then your desired command and close it with the mirrored < (i cannot do that here otherwise it will be tagged), dont forget to close your command when the tagged word or sentence is done, you can do that with </ then the same command again and then again the mirrored <.

what else can we do?
b and /b - Bold
i and /i - Italic
u and /u - Underlined

red and /red - Red
blue and /blue - Blue
green and /green - Green

icon and /icon - Icon or Texture called by filename or name defined in textures.xml

i will try to get Oz's attention and see if we can get that into official Viewer so everyone can use it, right now only the icon thingy can be used and seen by everyone except Viewer 1 but i want to get at least Bold, Italic and Underlined into all Viewers because it allows us to emote in the middle of a sentence, something alot people always wanted.

CHUI (Communications Hub User Interface):

No Comment. Ofcourse it was NOT implemented!

Camera:

You can now "copy" and "paste" the camera positions with CTRL + Shift + C / V, its usefull for landscape photography and if you have to manipulate the scene but cant reach something or make something load

Snapshots:

DOWNLOAD

DOWNLOAD LINUX VERSION
Thanks to Drakeo

enjoy,
Niran

Changelog:

2.1.5

fixed WatchdogEnabled causing a crash sometimes on first startup
fixed the sculpt texture picker beeing out of the tools floater
fixed some minor alignment and layout bugs in group panel
disabled mesh upload menu entries
disabled resizing the people floaters width
tweaked IM controls layout and slide button layout a bit
changed and simplified code for switching the IM controls
changed double click inventory item behavior to add/remove instead of wear/remove
changed a german group land label and fix it getting cut off
moved the slide controls button in World Map to the legend panel
removed ability to switch skins
removed all skins
added ability to save and load camera positions (CTRL + Shift + C/V)
added some non noticable optimizations
added ability to write in bold, italic and with underlined text
added ability to write in red, green and blue
cleaned up code and XMLs

Beta 2.1.4 (2529)

DO NOT USE ANY OTHER SKIN THAN DARKNESS, THEY HAVNT BEEN UPDATED IN MONTHS AND MAY CAUSE YOU TO CRASH ENDLESSLY! - and ruin my crashrates...

now with 20% more rainbows....

i mean....lul...just...read and DONT click download before you finished reading everything (dont forget to read the secret invisible message)

User Interface:

I fixed the missing image for the machinima sidebar button some repeatedly complained about...

I also fixed a bug in RLVa that allows you to open your Inventory through the "share" button in people/IM. Its not a client bug, its a RLVa related bug and i've told Kitty about it so she can fix it for everyone by default but for now you will have my fix :P

Grid options wont stay open anymore when you close the tools floater, this will also quit the build mode and deselect everything.

I've readded one loadingscreen and added a completely new one!

General:

Everything else is just some minor clean up in code or XML aswell as some little label corrections and all that stuff not worth mentioning...

enjoy,
Niran

DOWNLOAD

Changelog:

2.1.4

readded one old loadingscreen picture
added one new loadingscreen picture
fixed Machinima Sidebar having no icon
fixed share button allows opening of inventory when RLVa forbids it
fixed grid options staying open when you close the build floater
fixed spammery of WARNING: LLView::getChild: Found child named "Tab_Seperator" but of wrong type class LLIconCtrl, expecting class LLButton *
fixed WatchdogDisabled debug annoying again
fixed create new script and mass permission buttons having wrong labels in german
fixed some texts and texture progress bar overlapping in texture console

Beta 2.1.3 (2520)

Another fixidifix beta :P

User Interface:

I fixed the little bug i mentioned in my toast fading system which made your own chat messages stay 100% transparent when you send another messsage while your last message was fading out already.

Textures:

I drastically reduced the amount of VRAM my Viewer uses by stock from about 600mb (out of 768 in total) to about 100mb, thats a crazy amount of 500mb less, it fixes the texture blurring issue but... there will be only 10 loadingscreens now, 3 of them get selected randomly each start of the Viewer resulting in only 3 big textures preloaded into the VRAM at max, basically now that i've implemented this random system i could just implement all 38 loadingscreens again but it needed some cleanup anyway, i removed pretty much all old ones, all pictures with my or other Avatars beeing the main focus on screen and leaving only those that show mostly scenery only, sort of a best of all time... to say goodbye to all the other ones you can find all 21 removed loadingscreens below, download them in full resolution (4000x2204 if available, 1920x1058 otherwise) and use them as background for your desktop or whatever else you may need them for, just dont repost them somewhere saying you did them.

If you think that one of these should come back, tell me.

Download all 28 (+10 available) removed loadingscreen images

(PNG)

Snapshots:

DOWNLOAD

enjoy the probably best update ever,

Niran

Changelog:

2.1.3

changed RenderTreeLODFactor to 5.0 by default

cleaned up code

reduced package size for slower internet connections

fixed chat toasts staying invisible when sending chat messages while toasts are fading

fixed texture blurring issue and reduced Vram used by 500mb