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.

Saturday, April 25, 2015

Black Dragon Viewer - Update 2.4.2.2 "Aberrated Future"

Yay, it is that time again, sorry for the long delay, i got sidetracked by GTA5 and the keybindings thing.


So this update contains some much needed fixing, first off, a nasty crash fix when right clicking certain rigged meshes as well as a fix for a crash when getting disconnected by the server.

Then. Post effects have been added to preferences, you can now set greyscale, sepia, posterize as well as the new "Chromatic Aberration" in preferences and the Machinima Sidebar. Preferences has "default" buttons, like you would expect them to.

I made some changes to the calculations for the loadingscreen percentages and capped it at 100% (it went to 130% and beyond for me very often because my pre-caching time is not 6 seconds), also teleporting in-SIM will not cause a 1 second halt anymore (yay for teleport spamming early V2 times).

Also the issues with "Report Abuse" should be fixed now, no more pink screen or whole freeze frame layer. Freeze Frame is now disabled when using Abuse Report's snapshot function.

Rendering. Chromatic Aberration, what is it?


Color fringing, simple said. It offset's the red and blue channel depending on the distance from the calculated pixel to the middle of the screen, the further away from the middle of the screen the stronger the fringing effect. There is a slider to change the strength of course.

Directional Volumetric Lighting should be fixed now and should behave properly with the new 350 GTA5 Game Ready driver. Note to self: don't stuff vectors into floats.

Finally, foot shadows have been removed. I'm talking about those old, pesky, legacy, black, half transparent, fixed dots at your feet when using non deferred rendering and most noticable with the totally defunct and broken pre-Windlight rendering in my Viewer. Woooooosh.



Keybindings


Okay, so this is a reeeeeally huge thing. Almost fully customizable controls, not yet done of course. Right now you can only change the first person and third person movement controls, they won't stick over relogs, they save but they aren't loaded in the next session yet. Loading them is causing me a lot of trouble, i have to figure out a proper way to save and load them without causing the Viewer to go boom violently. You can find the "Keybindings" tab in preferences but don't expect too much, this is highly work in progress and mostly concept. In case you wonder how it works since there are no messages telling you anything: Hold down the key you want to bind and click the "Bind key" button... or hold down the "Bind key" button and press the key you want to bind, both works but only with keys that are not used in the UI or by gestures (it will bind them but will not function in most cases as gestures have a higher priority than your movement controls).



Snapshots






Changelog


2.4.2.2


Added: (WIP) Customizable keybindings.
Added: Chromatic Aberration feature to shaders, not sure about the place, might push it around some shaders.
Added: Hover Height option to pie menus.
Added: Chromatic Aberration slider to Machinima Sidebar and Preferences.
Added: Greyscale Strength slider to Preferences.
Added: Posterization Samples slider to Preferences.
Added: Sepia Strength slider to Preferences.
Changed: Loadingscreen percentage calculations a bit.
Changed: Space + Alt to "Spin Over" when controlling the camera, instead of E + Alt.
Fixed: Loadingscreen percentage going over 100%.
Fixed: Crash on disconnect.
Fixed: Crash when right clicking certain broken meshes.
Fixed: Compile. We should always return a value if we are expecting one.
Fixed: NVidia 350 driver series going nuts when enabling directional volumetric lighting. Don't stuff vectors into floats.
Fixed: Freeze Frame causing issues when reporting someone. Temporarly disable Freeze Frame while we do the actual shot and restore it later if we had it on.
Fixed: Snapshot floater opens on second and further snapshot when Abuse Report is opened.
Removed: Screen Teleport delay.
Removed: Foot Shadows once and for all. They were useless for way too long.
Misc: Removal of unneeded parts in main_view.xml
Misc: Cleaned up some old stuff.
Misc: Shader cleanup after experiments.

11 comments:

  1. I'm liking the viewer, friend suggested it to me a while back but im curious when are you going to add these lookat options in.
    http://s25.postimg.org/pmr43kiin/lookat.png

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    Replies
    1. Never and since i recently failed to turn attention on the importance of removing named lookats thus making these options obsolete and counter all drama that is caused by it, i totally gave up on that matter.

      You can look up the entire, really painful conversation about that here:
      SLUniverse Thread - Lookats in official Viewer

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    2. Well that's a shame, its basically the only reason why I still use firestorm, and im pretty sure same reason for most others, I mean I do switch between black dragon and firestorm but would want black dragon my always to go to viewer. Or well..you could just hide own look at targets by default, making it useless for other users on different viewers having it enabled, slowly killing the feature. just making a suggestion from what ive read on that thread.

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    3. That is exactly the point, it is NOT my responsibility to clean up a mess other Viewers caused with their features. I am NOT going to implement a counter for it because other Viewers are refusing to take it out.

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    4. Thats a shame, guess im stuck with firestorm until something is done and well use your viewer for photos only..

      Delete
    5. Start by going to all Viewers who include a "labeled lookats" feature and complain at them.

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    6. Why should he go to other TPVs to complain when the actual problem is YOU and YOUR viewer? Doesn't make too much sense to me!

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    7. Why am i the problem when other Viewers implement a feature that literally bashes on Viewers without a counter feature?

      If your problem is that others can see your name on your lookat, why don't you go to any other Viewer that has this feature and complain at them, THEY ARE THE ROOT CAUSE, THEY SHOW YOUR NAME, THEY WANT TO CAUSE TROUBLE.

      Delete
  2. Well that's just pure pawsomeness. Thanks for fixing Volumetric not requiring DoF to be enabled! Previous 2 or so releases, it would remove bloom and FXAA if you enabled volumetric but had DoF disabled. Also the picture-in-picture thing when its resolution was at less than 1.00. But now it all werks :)

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    Replies
    1. All your mentioned problems were fixed in 2.4.2 already. 2 releases back.

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    2. Weeeeellll, at least in theory, cause I still had them on the last release prior to this one. I guess it was my GPU and/or drivers being weird (660 Ti and last WHQL drivers before 350) or something. I mean, it worked for you, so...

      Delete