Thursday, February 21, 2019

RLV 2.9.26

Hi there,

This week I was in a "fix the damn annoying bugs already" kind of mood. So that's exactly what I did with the RLV, in particular with the rendering part of the vision restriction features.

Because I couldn't stand this anymore :

Your silhouette is painting over my body !

Nor this :

What's the deal with my transparent curtains and shadows turning opaque and very shiny when my vision is restricted ??


So I looked into it and after some significant changes (because those annoyances above were not actually bugs, but side-effects of the way I used to render the vision spheres and all the features that came with them, in particular how to prevent alpha surfaces from poking through said spheres), now I'm happy to say those two quirks are fixed !

See for yourself :

Now your silhouette stops doing weird things to my body.

And the curtains look like curtains even when my vision is restricted (which is why it is black outside).


So those two changes above are some of the "annoying bugs" that needed fixin'.

There's also a nice side-effect to this change, which you notice when you press Ctrl Alt T to highlight transparent surfaces in red. Before this version, you had to press Ctrl Alt Shift V to force a complete visual refresh of all the objects around you to make sure all the transparent surfaces were highlighted. This was due to when the faces were registered. Now, you no longer have to do that because the change is immediate.


But that's not all.

How many times did you ruin a perfect shot by clicking on your own avatar, making it turn its back to the camera while you meant to click on one of your attachments instead ?

And how many times did you try to steer your avatar with your mouse but had a hard time finding a good spot to click on (especially when your name tag is hidden) because you are wearing so much unrigged stuff ?

Now there is a new debug setting named "RestrainedLoveBreakFocusOnClick" (I didn't find anything longer and more difficult to remember sorry) that is TRUE by default to keep in line with the usual behavior, but if you turn it to FALSE, two things happen :

- Clicking on your avatar no longer switches back to mouse-steering mode unless you press Shift.
- Clicking on your avatar or any of your attachments while Shift is down switches back to mouse-steering mode, regardless of whether the attachment has a touch response or not, and it works through HUDs too (which is great if you're wearing a HUD that takes a lot of space on your screen, like a blindfold, a RemVision screen or whatever).

To change the value of "RestrainedLoveBreakFocusOnClick", simply open the Advanced menu (press Ctrl Alt D if you don't see it), go to "Debug Settings", paste "RestrainedLoveBreakFocusOnClick" in the white field then click on "FALSE", and that's it. I'll add a preference for it later if I can because it is a bit buried right now.


Speaking of debug setting, you might have noticed that when "Show Debug Messages" was active in the RLV menu, getting a lot of RLV commands at the same time would slow your viewer down to a crawl until the flow of commands stops. This was due to the viewer sending a lot of debug traces in the console at the same time.

Now, with the new "RestrainedLoveLogging" debug setting, the debug traces are only sent to the console when it is set to TRUE (it is FALSE by default), so no more slowdown when "Show Debug Messages" is active. This is actually Chorazin Allen's work on Kokua, all I did was take his changes and integrate them into the RLV itself. Thanks Chorazin !

Finally, there was a bug that made the viewer crash when receiving a @getstatusall and being under a ton of RLV restrictions. It took some time to fix and test, but I'm confident it won't be a problem anymore now.

No need to paste the changelist here, it basically repeats all that I have explained above.



You can grab the Windows version here :
http://www.erestraints.com/realrestraint/


The MD5 hash for the Windows executable is :
fc7528c436fa981a025c58ce198df1a5


Have fun !
Marine


PS : If you experience trouble with disappearing HUDs (for example the Lelutka minimized button) or parts of HUDs, please download again. I have ninja-updated the RLV 2.9.26 twice since its release without increasing the version number because I had to urgently remove a little optimization right before going to bed, then worked a little more and re-added it (with an additional check) the morning after. And I didn't want to increase the version or send a group notice twice while doing it. Sorry for the inconvenience.
For information, the MD5 hash of the initial version (with the bug) was 0350b5f406ff48f154f475ea9532d59b and the one of the second version (without the optimization) was 8262fc9c5e23ebc8642796150fa9a314.