The Christmas / New Year period saw three more rapid-fire releases of the Black Dragon viewer as NiranV Dean continues to refine and tweak it both in response to feedback and as a result of stepping on a few bugs.

The first update, version 2.4.1.5, was available for people to add to their Christmas stockings on December 24th. This saw a merge with the Lab’s released 3.7.23 code base, and so captures everything up to an include the last set of maintenance updates from the Lab, which includes the fixes for joint offsets in rigged meshes.

Chief among Niran’s own updates came the ability to hide the Favourites Bar (which in the most recent versions of the Black Dragon UI has been sitting above the menu / address bar). The toggle is in the right-click context menu displayed when clicking on the menu / address bar; unchecking it will cause the latter to slide up and hide the Favourites bar from view. Checking the option will cause the Favourite Bars to be revealed once more. You can also achieve the same results via Preferences > Interface > Show Favourites Panel, if you prefer.

An “experimental connections issues” warning was also added to the viewer, which is designed to show when your ping time to the SL simhost exceeds 500ms. I’m not sure what form the warning takes, as I’ve not been able to fiddle with things sufficiently to push my ping rate that high.

The “New Years Update”, version 2.4.1.6, which appeared on December 31st, saw an overhaul of RLVa with the viewer, which Niran notes had become somewhat broken due to not having received TLC for several updates. There may still be further tweaks and fixes to come, but feedback would seem to be required for that to happen – so if you’re an RLV user and find problems still, please pass good feedback on the issues you’re encountering to Niran.

Also, version 2.4.1.6 added the ability to show / hide the Merchant Outbox and Received Items folders in Inventory, if preferred. You’ll need to re-log after enabling / disabling the option to show / hide the folders.

When the folders are active in Inventory, remember you’ll still be able to open the Merchant Outbox panel from the Edit menu, and Received Items via the panel near the bottom of the Inventory floater. This release also added the ability to change keyboard layouts without the need for a re-log, and added some new parcel property icons.

On January 2nd, 2015, Niran issued version 2.4.1.7, which is essentially a bug fix for an error introduced with the 2.4.1.6 release, although it includes a few additional tweaks.

All three releases came with various tweaks, fixes and assorted minor changes (code clean-ups, etc.), which are listed in the release notes for each updated, linked-to above. Please refer to them for further details on an individual release.

Once again, a series of small changes serving to further refine Black Dragon and meet the needs of users, which should help to keep people happy, and which ensure the viewer keeps pace with the Lab’s code releases.

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