[Where is 'Highlight Transparent']

On 12/25/2023 at 10:27 PM, Prokofy Neva said:

If you, as a more or less literature techie person, are infuriated by Firestorm, well, understand that at least one of the reasons I don't use FS is THAT.

Im very much infuriated by Firestorm because its made to dumb down people who still have mental capacities above or around average and handholds those that do not instead of teaching them to get better. The way FS spells out every obvious option as a sentence explaining what it does is so much worse than what LL does with their obvious "idiot proof" labels that assume you are a mental retard. This is what tooltips are for, when the option label explains the option in greater detail than the tooltip which at that point could just be "^this" or "what the label says", then something is wrong

[Where is 'Highlight Transparent']

On 12/24/2023 at 8:19 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

I don't  want to use keyboard short-cuts, they are annoying and often are more steps.

Excuse me what?

How are shortcuts annoying? You don't have to use them, they are completely optional.

How are shortcuts more steps? The whole point of a shortcut is that you can directly access a function at any time, there is only a single step.

Also CTRL + Alt + T is THE common Second Life basic shortcut anyone should know. It's like the global Copy (CTRL + C) and Paste (CTRL + V) and Search (CTRL + F) functions. These are things absolutely everyone must know. They are like knowing how to put one foot in front of the other to walk.

[The Existence of a Face Undeforming Animation?]

On 12/19/2023 at 7:53 PM, Christina Halpin said:

I missed that. Thank you for correcting. So we seem to agree that by itself that reset-skeleton is a poor choice.

I would argue the reset-skeleton option is dangerous -- the average SL user will expect it to do what it should do, and will get the illusion that the problem is solved.

The easiest solution is to simply log off for a moment. That has an advantage over simply poofing for a moment because it is relatively straightforward to return to the same location.

I very much do not agree that reset skeleton in any capacity is a poor choice. I'd never ever recommend anything other. Others having to reset skeleton you is but a mere minor inconvenience. One i'd see being fixed but its LL we are talking about, in the meantime simply jump 1000m up and back down  (if you HAVE to undeform yourself for others and can't be assed to tell others to do the obvious reset skeleton for you), the "Back" navigation button is very handy for that.

[The Existence of a Face Undeforming Animation?]

32 minutes ago, Christina Halpin said:

My testing, today matched my previous experience -- the reset skeleton option fixed only how an avatar looked to itself, it didn't affect how other people in the sim saw the avatar. To fix how your avatar looks to other people, you can transport away and then back, or of course log off and back on.

I did mention that it is local only and i did mention that undeforming for others simply requires "poofing" for a moment.

[I would like my camera mouvements to be faster in the Black dragon viewer]

On 12/12/2023 at 10:14 PM, Nalates Urriah said:

I suppose it depends on what you are experiencing...

The mouse has a "resolution" which is an OS (Windows/Apple) setting. Some mice have buttons to change mouse resolution on the fly.

In Windows, the setting is in Mouse Properties->Pointer Options (tab)->Pointer Speed (slider)

THe OS sends mouse info into the viewer. The setting affects mouse speed in the viewer... and all apps.

In BD on the Camera page of Preferences, there are several Camera Settings. Play with those. You can Ctrl+LMB-click on a slider to return it to the default setting. (RMB-click returns the setting to its previous setting.)

It is CTRL + RMB for default. You might want to correct that.

[Black Dragon 5.0 is out of Alpha]

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...

[The Existence of a Face Undeforming Animation?]

On 12/14/2023 at 4:49 PM, Christina Halpin said:

People enter SL, their bodies are constructed, and they think of that as neutral. When an animation persists, changing their body, they want to go back to that original-construction body. If that's different from all zero's -- and I think it usually is -- they don't want to go to all zeroes, then want to return to their at-entry bodies.  Fortunately, all zeroes probably comes close, and it might be good enough that people don't notice the difference.

I am guessing that firestorm's undeform is all 0's and is the same as what Avastar calls "Neutral Shape." it gets my lip pursing, shoulder breadth, and  jaw jut wrong. I don't like those changes, but they aren't that noticeable.

I remind everyone that animations persistence is client-side.

Pretty much this.

On 12/11/2023 at 7:34 AM, Raven Huntsman said:

The above sounds a little like misinformation (or out of date information?) because in my experience, an 'undeform' or deform reset animation that has the bones keyed to zero puts the bones back to zero as expected. Given the age of this thread though, maybe things changed during that time however I thought I'd update as this post came up when I was searching.

This is easily testable too, with a deforming animation and a reset animation on a single bone. Enable developer joints/bone view. Play the deform animation, stop it, then play the reset, and then use the in-viewer 'undeform' and 'reset skeleton' options. You'll observe no change between the reset animation and the in viewer undeform. Therefore functionally this is perfectly fine for user-experience.

As for the OPs question, you can achieve a facial deform reset very easily by simply creating an untouched rig and keying the face bones (translation + rotation) to zero and exporting a .anim with bone translations. 

Undeformers get you "close" enough that people normally don't notice. Also you cannot test this with a single bone, it is highly deform, undeform and shape dependent, i've most commonly noticed it on shoulders which usually end up being slightly wider than usual.

Also there is no point in using undeformers, thats why we have the reset skeleton feature to begin with it is infinitely superior to deform animations, respects all active deforms (such as for your attachments) and systematically reconstructs everything back to how it should.

[Black Dragon 5.0 is out of Alpha]

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)

[Qavimator Freezing]

On 11/29/2023 at 1:40 AM, Frionil Fang said:

I've certainly made some hand poses with BD and uploaded the results. The files did need some hex editing to cull out unused bones (it saves all bones instead of just the active ones, even if it implies it shouldn't be doing that) and fix the bone priorities (the whole point for me was to get properly working priority 6 animations for hand overrides, which no longer works properly if you upload a .bvh instead of an .anim with bone-level priorities) but still a better deal for me than paying a subscription for a tool that I need 2 times a year.

That was in the first version, it has since been fixed, the Viewer only saves keyframes you actually added now.

Per-bone priority is also coming, now knowing that its actually working.

On 11/29/2023 at 1:24 AM, Orwar said:

   Last I played around with that it didn't allow you to actually save animations, have they changed that now?

   @NiranV Dean was saying something about LL not allowing it or something a while back, unless I misremember. 

That was posing others

[How Does Your SL Look Today?]

On 11/25/2023 at 8:00 PM, gwynchisholm said:

...black dragon for example sees it as an intel igpu and disables a bunch of options outright which is nonsense.

Hey good thing you remind me. Since intel has finally managed to catch up and their latest GPU's were finally capable of compiling the shaders required to run Deferred Rendering (which is now completely obsolete since PBR gets rid of any pre-Deferred and forced me to revert to LL's shaders which run fine on Intel) i can finally get rid of those limitations (until i reimplement my rendering changes and Intel refuses to work again.

It also wasn't nonsense, it was only logical to disable Deferred (and thus 99% of the Viewer's rendering features) because it simply wouldn't work on Intel (until their latest GPU's) due to unknown shader compiling errors on Intel GPU's only. Leaving these options enabled confused users because they thought these options were working (because they were ticked) but in reality they weren't. Users couldn't tell the difference because there was none, it was simply not working leaving users to believe everything was fine, they would then turn up to me complaining that they can't see shadows, depth of field, materials and so on and with bad indoor shots and super jpeg compression it was hard to tell if Deferred was even enabled.

[SL features for combat gameplay.]

On 11/21/2023 at 7:53 PM, arton Rotaru said:

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post the link to the GitHub repo of the required viewer in here. But you can find it on Discord in #scripting. The viewer itself can be downloaded from the wiki page I linked above.

Unfortunately the game_control server version has been removed from Aditi entirely to make room for an upcoming server release QA. It will be back next week within a new server version.

I'll have to check it out when i have time. Currently in preps for the PBR Beta.

[SL features for combat gameplay.]

On 11/18/2023 at 12:27 AM, arton Rotaru said:

Right, it just is an event that makes controller inputs available to LSL. It doesn't add universal game controller support.

For those buttons to be detected, specifically the D-Pad which is currently not possible with what we got, they would have to implement something that can detect these, so clientside there has to be some extended support too, which means i should probably joink this as i've been wanting to support the DPad for a long time

[Blackdragon Viewer question]

You might be high up, if so move below 10m altitude for the maximum math precision. As you go up in altitude, precision of positions slowly become worse as you shift decimal digits. -> every tenfold you lose one decimal digit precision.

[Issue with single hand animations being stomped on by turning or bumping]

On 10/16/2023 at 1:34 PM, BinBash said:

Like any large code based project there are bits of code that never get called, disabled code and code that never was even implemented in the first place.  I'm sure there are methods to remove the clutter but I'm a programmer, among many other things, and don't find it useful these days to clean up unused code and often that same code serves as a reference so it can be helpful to myself, and others, to leave it in.

I suspect that the above is true for the official viewer code, which I happen to grab a copy of frequently, and I find myself in areas of the code that appear to be like others that I've worked with, which happens in my own projects as well, and I'll find my self scratching my head when my changes don't take effect, only to become aware that I've been editing the wrong section or file.  This can also happen when I'm searching for a bug, find it, but are unable to affect any change since I'm in the wrong section.

Speaking of "wrong sections" this looks like the old BVH code, addressing the usable 4 priorities.

I think everyone here is aware that the ".anim" (which LL are referring to as "internal animation format") file doesn't have a single priority, this header reference is just that, information.  Each joint has its own priority and how an application creates these priorities may be different from each other.  In the case of Bento Buddy we make a single priority most notable, in the exporter, and below that there are tools to alter each joint animation priority, of which all will contain the same one found in the animation exporter.  In this particular case the default export priority is always used unless the joint has the "override" flag on it, set in this special "joint priority" section.

Unless some code has been added to the viewer I suspect that, as always, one cannot determine the animation priority of any joint and, in fact, I can set the default priority to 0 and all joints to 6, and you'll probably be just as confused as the OP, and that other guy.

 

On 10/22/2023 at 8:56 PM, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

BVH exports don't store any priorities or looping data. That's why you have to enter such information on the SL import panel.

Interesting, i suppose this answers a couple of my questions i could never figure out about both BVH and ANIM both which are incredibly undocumented in SL.

So what i get from this: Yes, bone priorities actually work (good to know so i'll add it to my animator) AND BVH not writing any of the crucial animation information explains the upload dialog, tho in my Viewer .ANIM has the upload dialog now too, to allow changing any value before upload. Though this does not explain why my Poser animation is overwritten by a select few face pose HUD's since the animation is created internally with priority 7 which simply shares its priority down to all bones automatically.

[Issue with single hand animations being stomped on by turning or bumping]

11 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

They may not be defined explicitly, but the viewer (Firestorm at least) does respect priorities higher than 4 by allowing them to play even if new P4 animations start afterwards.

Again this doesn't seem to be the case when used in AO's. I have a particular case where my running and turning animations overwrite priority 5,6,7. Everything else however doesn't. I'm using a serverside AO. All animations are priority 4, standing too and they do not overwrite them. It seems very particular.

[Issue with single hand animations being stomped on by turning or bumping]

According to the Viewer code it goes up to 7, technically 5 and 6 don't exist. They aren't defined, although since 7 is defined as the last they technically exist, just not specifically defined in the list (they are still automatically counted though). 5,6,7 are all overtaken by Priority 4 in an AO maybe i should have clarified that, playing a priority 6 does overwrite 4 and doesn't allow it to take over the 6, however using these in an AO does seem to be buggy.

Even my Poser which uses ADDITIVE_PRIORITY (7) is still overwritten by some cheeky face posing HUDs.

 

[Issue with single hand animations being stomped on by turning or bumping]

Nothing you can do about that sadly. The Viewer treats priority 5,6,7 as 4 and animations with priority 4 that come AFTER will overwrite it. Something i might want to look into and fix.

[NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070]

On 9/22/2023 at 6:37 AM, Sasha Holden said:

I have a very good video card. just looking for suggestions on good settings. I do not use fog or shadow, I even do not use the trees that are generated in-game ie non-mesh or Sculpted, I use Firestorm, Is there a suggestion also to find a viewer where we can take awesome photos, I do not feel that the filters on Firestorm are awesome enough. Any suggestion is welcomed!

8 hours ago, sandi Mexicola said:

Black Dragon might be good for photography.

If you don't use shadows you are throwing away most of what makes Black Dragon good for photography (graphics wise), if you now turn off SSAO as well then there's no reason anymore to use BD at all.

[Improving Mouselook]

On 9/26/2023 at 8:15 PM, Katherine Heartsong said:

I'm not familiar with Black Dragon beyond hearing the name, but what's shown above is a great set of improvements. I can't leave FS behind though because I am deeply attached to both the Favourites panel, but mostly the custom AOs feature so my screen has no HUDs on it. I will download and try it out though, if to do nothing more than a FPS test and get familiar with your app's UX.

Where is the download of the most recent version, Niran?

The most recent release can always be found via the Download section on the right sidebar on my blog. (Direct links are bound to die as i remove old versions)
https://niranv-sl.blogspot.com/
Note that it does not include the above improvements yet (that would currently only be in a test-test-super-test build but will soon become part of the PBR alpha build if i get some time to work down the still (surprisingly) quite small buglist)

[Improving Mouselook]

On 9/21/2023 at 1:13 AM, oneLastHusky said:

I'm very thank for your great work to  improve our experience.

But do you guys have any ideas about the "lock mouselook direction with head direction option"?

I have seen many requests about this in the forums and I'm also seeking this feature. When in animations, lots of them will move your head to a needed direction, but once you turn on the mouselook, your sight direction always leave where you are looking at before the animation and not track the head direction.I think this will be very helpful when doing some video recording.

For example:In first pic, I'm looking at the ground and then when I turn to another pose, you guys can see I'm still looking at the same direction in the second pic, but the right direction should look like the third pic.

I've not heard about a lock mouselook to head rotation option yet, locking your view direction to your head's will absolutely cause you to keep rotating infinitely if not used with something like the option to turn up the rotation-degree. This can and will only work properly while being stationary and locked in your rotation, aka when sitting down.

[Borderless mode for SecondLife (and any application)]

BD doesn't need a restart and neither should Catznip (where my Borderless Mode is coming from)

[2023 - Which viewer is better for low end computers?]

The issue is obvious. 8GB is not enough to run any decently modern Viewer. Anything starting from the Performance Viewer or 64bit will require every little bit of those 8GB... and windows... and you can't even use all of it either! You will crash before you even get that high.

[Heavy Shadow under chin in Black Dragon (Fixed thankyou)]

3 hours ago, Aiyumei said:

Which is why I also mentioned also adjusting the setting as well in my comment 

You mentioned making sure they look like yours. I gave specifics, specifically i recommended not to set SSAO Effect to 0 like you did, 0 is close if not outright the same as "off" and thus wasting resources that could otherwise be used for improving the lighting.

[Photographer for hire]

9 minutes ago, krxsaya said:

weird, for me it looks normal. i can't edit the text anymore nor delete the entire thread to do it again.
 

You are using light mode.

As Quistess mentioned this is a formatting issue.

One way would be copy pasting the text again and clicking the "Copy as plain text" notification that should appear a the bottom. 

If you can't edit your post anymore make sure you are still properly logged in.

 

[How does your avatar look today ?]

2 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Sometimes it seems the simplest way, but it's pretty rare.

One thing I've noticed is no longer a problem is parts of a scene not rendering at all, which TPing away and back again would fix. That used to be pretty frequent; I haven't had that happen in forever.

Shhh! Don't jinx it. It took LL years to get here.