Black Dragon 5.0 is out of Alpha

[JeromFranzic]

I'm trying to like it... still my choice for the odd angles, its PBR implementation is all right but not without issues. 

Anyway, I miss some of the more advanced color and lighting controls it once had. I still have 4.3.2 installed, that version has the advanced color and lighting controls built in.

For the Linux/Wine fans, I can't get 5.0 to work for me. Not a huge deal personally, but... BD just won't run anymore, even if you have the proper Visual C++ libraries installed in Wine. Yup... we're stuck with 4.3.2 until it no longer works in SL if you must use BD.

First shot is in 5.0, inside Rachel Breaker's office. No PP, straight from the viewer. Second shot is from 4.3.2. I'm guessing that's one of Rachel's "labs" I stumbled on to. Looks like a hill full of $%^& LOL! Turned up the green hues and added a bit of chromatic aberration. Also taken straight from BD, 4.3.2.

I know a lot of you have more expertise in using BD as an artistic and videography tool, so I'd like your thoughts on the new viewer... I'll try to follow up here as much as I can. If you have managed to run any version of 5.0 in Linux/Wine, I'd love to hear from you as well.

 

[Henri Beauchamp]

It works ”fine” (1) under Wine (tested with v8.21) for me, on the condition to delete the old cache directory first (2), else, it crashes, but Niran explains this in his blog post, last paragraph, in bold.

And no, you do not normally need to install VS runtimes for Wine.

Also, as for every PBR viewer using LL's latest (shadows-breaking) changes to the PBR shaders (AFAIK, all viewers but mine), you will need to set the ”RenderSkyAutoAdjustHDRScale” debug setting to 1.0 (instead of 2.0), else the sky will appear white instead of blue...

 

(1) Well, as fine as possible, given known Wine bugs...

(2) ~/.wine/drive_c/users/<your user name here>/AppData/Local/Black Dragon

Edited December 4, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[JeromFranzic]

OK... got V5 to work. Deleted my home directory's /.wine folder and started over, then reinstalled BD 5 without the runtimes or dxvk. It works as well as I can run it in my GTX 1050 laptop. Just need to tweak a few more settings in BD. Thanks

(Linux distro used is Ubuntu Studio 22.04.3 LTS, with the latest Nvidia drivers.)

 

Edited December 5, 2023 by JeromFranzic
added distro info

[Nalates Urriah]

I had to do a clean install of BD 5.0.1 to get it to run.

The EEP settings tend to appear in BD with less ambient light and more saturation. My avatar appears to be perpetually blushing and to have a bit of a darker skin. I can generally tweak the gamma up to correct the changes.

[NiranV Dean]

Note: While it is out of Alpha, i still don't consider it a "full release" worthy update hence why Beta. It still has quite a bunch of issues (and i'm not talking about PBR), the merge with PBR has left a lot of completely random parts broken or wonky. Before i can even try looking into PBR itself i'll have to work down the constantly growing list of bugs that people keep finding. After that i can start looking into PBR and what is and isn't official behavior.

On 12/4/2023 at 10:52 AM, Henri Beauchamp said:

It works ”fine” (1) under Wine (tested with v8.21) for me, on the condition to delete the old cache directory first (2), else, it crashes, but Niran explains this in his blog post, last paragraph, in bold.

Also, as for every PBR viewer using LL's latest (shadows-breaking) changes to the PBR shaders (AFAIK, all viewers but mine), you will need to set the ”RenderSkyAutoAdjustHDRScale” debug setting to 1.0 (instead of 2.0), else the sky will appear white instead of blue...

I think i've added the HDR Scale slider to preferences in 5.0.1 (with a bunch of others to fine tune the sky auto adjust thing and an option to turn it off completely).

In regards to the clean install: Generally speaking it is almost never required to do a clean install of the Viewer unless it is a massive update that reworks caching (or in this case basically the entire render pipeline), on my local builds i generally do not require to clear cache or settings so whether it is actually required is usually for the poor testers to find out... and sometimes i simply just forget to mention that you should. Although a version jump from 4.3.2 to 5.0 should be indication enough that it would be a good idea especially when facing problems.

Also oof at that shadow issue. However if i see that right and this is for 7.1.1 i do not yet have these changes. I'm still pre 7.0.0 (missing a couple idk maybe like 20-30 or so)

Edited December 15, 2023 by NiranV Dean

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, NiranV Dean said:

Also oof at that shadow issue. However if i see that right and this is for 7.1.1 i do not yet have these changes. I'm still pre 7.0.0 (missing a couple idk maybe like 20-30 or so)

It is still not fixed, but you will find on the JIRA I opened for this issue an update I made with hints for adjusted settings to (partly) revive shadows in LL's broken code (that I sadly had to adopt, since it became a prerequisite to other fixes to PBR shaders and render pipeline).

But there are many other issues with PBR indeed (e.g. BUG-234816 or BUG-234820)... So yes, it should still very much be considered ”beta” despite LL having pushed it (or rather shoved) to ”release” status. 🫣

Edited December 15, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[NiranV Dean]

On 12/15/2023 at 9:32 PM, Henri Beauchamp said:

It is still not fixed, but you will find on the JIRA I opened for this issue an update I made with hints for adjusted settings to (partly) revive shadows in LL's broken code (that I sadly had to adopt, since it became a prerequisite to other fixes to PBR shaders and render pipeline).

But there are many other issues with PBR indeed (e.g. BUG-234816 or BUG-234820)... So yes, it should still very much be considered ”beta” despite LL having pushed it (or rather shoved) to ”release” status. 🫣

I think i might accidentally be unable to merge the latest 7.1.1 code for a bit longer. Covid really got me bad and i think its suddenly getting worse again...