Category: Viewers

NiranV Dean once again issued a rapid-fire series of updates to Black Dragon in week #29, upping the version number from 2.4.3.6 to 2.4.3.9 in the process.

The reason for the speed of updates is a combination of the Lab pushing through quite a lot at the moment, and Niran providing some tweaks, fixes and updates of his own / sourced from other RPVs.

The first update out of the gate was 2.4.3.7, on Monday July 13th, which incorporated the Lab’s summer Maintenance release (version 3.8.2.303563 at the time of writing – see the release notes on the Lab’s release for a list of the updates incorporated into Black Dragon).

This was followed on Wednesday, July 15th by version 2.4.3.8, which incorporated the Lab’s Project Big Bird updates. These are a series of viewer-side fixes for a fair number of attachment issues people have been experiencing since the arrival of AIS v3, and some which pre-date it. These include, but are not limited to, teleporting / crossing a region and having attachments removed; teleporting or crossing a region and losing attachments in your view while others can still see them (and vice-versa); seeing attachments as removed but the viewer reports them as attached, etc.

This version also incorporates Kitty Barnett’s “borderless window mode” (Preferences > Display). when enabled, this will expand the viewer window to the full size of your screen, hiding the title bar without the need for a re-log. When disabled, will return the viewer window to its last framed sized.

Released on Sunday, July 19th, version 2.4.3.9 contains further maintenance tweaks and updates, notably the official code for right-clicking and selecting worn mesh.

Niran has also addressed the issue found in the Notifications Viewer, where the buttons for accepting / declining a group invitation are only displayed when an invitation is received – if you miss it due to AFK or anything, and then open the invitation in the Notifications floater, it is displayed without any means to act upon it – see BUG-9625, which also points out that invitations to Experiences, and requests to accept deny debit permissions suffer the same issue).

As well as the above, Niran has included a range of fixes and updates with each of these releases – please refer for the relevant release notes for details – and is continuing to tweak things on the rendering side of things, improving things like lens flare, ans also tweaking the Unified Snapshot floater.

There will doubtless be a further Black Dragon update winging its way towards release very soon, one which contains the Lab’s Viewer-Managed Marketplace updates. In the meantime, these updates ensure Black Dragon remains on a par with the majority of the Lab’s offerings available in the viewer release channel.

Additional Links

• Black Dragon blog
• Black Dragon 2.4.3.7 release notes
• Black Dragon 2.4.3.8 release notes
• Black Dragon 2.4.3.9 release notes
• Black Dragon download page

On Thursday, July 9th, NiranV Dean released version 2.4.3.6 of his Black Dragon viewer.

The release brought with it a rapid-fire implementation of the Lab’s new notifications update from LL, which comes a little ahead of the curve, given the Lab prefer their code to be integrated into TPVs once it reaches RC status, and can be regarded as somewhat more stable than might be the case with a project viewer release. However, the code is such that it is apparently easy to manage should updates be forthcoming as that project progresses.

In implementing the notifications update, Niran has made some subtle changes to the notifications floater itself, improving the overall layout, although the overall functionality is pretty much as offered through the Lab’s current project viewer. Rather than describe the functionality here, readers are invited to read my overview of the project viewer.

The other major update with this release of Black Dragon release is related to shadows and lighting, and specifically, the uncoupling of shadow rendering from draw distance.

Because shadow rendering has been bound to draw distance, shadows tend to fade away the closer they are to your draw distance limit, with the result that the further objects are away from you, the less well-defined their shadows appear / the less shadows may influence how they appear, with objects close to the edge of your draw distance sometimes appearing shadowless.

With this change, Niran has added a new slider to the Display tab of Preferences, allowing the user to independently set a “shadow rendering distance”, thus allowing a better rendering and representation of shadows independent of draw distance.

The result is a much improved depth of view in-world, and greatly enhanced snapshots (see Niran’s samples accompanying the viewer’s release notes).

By-and-large, extending the shadow rendering distance shouldn’t result in any appreciable performance hit. However, there is a caveat, as Niran explains:

Increasing the shadow draw distance will reduce the overall shadow precision, 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 frame rate.

A side benefit of this, as Niran notes, is that because volumetric lighting is calculated via the shadow clip planes and shadow maps, increasing the shadow rendering distance enhances the volumetric lighting effects in the viewer. Again, check the sample images Niran provides with the release notes.

Other updates in this release include:

• Re-enabling of the experimental auto-hiding of the Textures, Sounds, Calling Cards, Landmarks, Notecards, Scripts, Photo Album, Animations, Gestures, Favourites and My Outfits folders in Inventory (debug: DebugHideEmptySystemFolders)
• Disabling of the auto-hiding of empty folders by default
• Improvements to SSAO defaults
• Freeze world and mode toggling issues, as reported in STORM-2118, fixed and implemented in this Black Dragon release
• Further RLVa updates.

As always, for the full range of changes / updates, please refer to the release notes.

Additional Links

• Black Dragon blog
• Black Dragon 2.4.3.6 release notes
• Black Dragon download page