37 lines
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3.8 KiB
Markdown
37 lines
No EOL
3.8 KiB
Markdown
# VCStudio - 21.06: Faster and More Understandable
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A new update just came to our favorite peace of Free Software. And even though it looks like a rather unimportant update, it's quite aesthetically pleasing regardless. Let's take a look at the Version 21.06 of Victorious Children Studio Organizer. The best tool out there for organizing Blender Animation Films.
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# Check For Updates Setting
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While hacking on VCStudio to make the next update required launching it over and over again, one server didn't like it much. When you launch VCStudio, each time it downloads one [file](https://notabug.org/jyamihud/VCStudio/src/master/settings/update.data) from the internet. A file that contains data about the updates.
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As you can see, the file is hosted on the notabug.org git server. Together with the rest of the project. And apparently they have some kind of security system on the server. If I launch VCStudio too often, it might wait for more then a few seconds on the launch, trying to get the file. Which was more than annoying for me and other hackers.
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So a new setting was introduced. If dis-activated, VCStudio will not download the file on the Launch, but rather when you click to see updates. In my opinion this is a worthy sacrifice. You may choose a notification style. To receive the updates information, automatically on launch. Or you can chose to check them manually your self.
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# Documentation
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To know how to use the software, sometimes, pure design is not enough. And even though we tried to make this program as well as possible, some aspects of it still remains a problem, for some users to understand intuitively. So a good documentation should be provided.
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In the last update 21.05 this documentation system was provided partially. But not for all aspects of the software. And not as well polished as now.
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In this version the Documentation system was updated. The documents for missing things were added. And extra documents were added too. Now if the document is talking about, let's say LBRY. You will have a link to read about LBRY too. And it will be a part of the documentation for VCStudio.
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Few more things would include, ability to scale the window down, while keeping the frame of the text visible, by collapsing the selection menu into icons. Also a UI switch was added, to auto download images right in the Documentation window. And support for `lbry://` links. Which is in a very early alpha, but will be a crucial step toward making those update documents, as one you reading now, to be available directly in the updater UI.
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# Speed & Optimization
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Some users with 4K monitors were experiencing freezes and severe slowness of the UI in VCStudio. Which was weird since it was tested on much slower hardware and still was very usable.
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The answer to it was, that since it's 4K it needs to render way more pixels. Which is a problem in cairo, the module that we are using to draw the graphics of VCStudio. We were testing it on slower hardware with smaller resolutions.
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To fix this issue for now, the decision was made to launch the software in a fixed sized window. That you can maximize if you need. Or make smaller in needed too. This fixed the problem of slowness significantly. Increasing performance even on our own machines. Hopefully users with slower hardware would not maximize it.
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Also another thing was fixed, that's related to speed. When blur was disabled, it made the transparent areas too transparent. Making it hard to read the UI. So a decision was made to boost the alpha channel of all transparent colors when blur is off.
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You can comment about this update [here](https://odysee.com/@blender-organizer:5/21.06:8), on Odysee. The web client for LBRY.
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 [What is LBRY?](../../wiki/extra/LBRY.md) |