Release of V0.8.5

2009-08-31T07:09:13Z

Changes in this version:
- New renderpipelines - one pass per light and deferred shading
- many changes and bugfixes to the GUI
- new GUI skin "simpl" by mk1
- better integration into existing renderwindows especially on windows systems
- new converters in modelconverter using assimp (assimp.sourceforge.net)
- a few new particle-affectors
- lots of other enhancements and fixes

Release of V0.7.0

2008-03-21T20:50:48Z

Very important Changes:
- Lightfeather now supports the use of different renderpipelines. A second
pipeline "One pass per Light" has been included in this version, but is
still in the experimental stage. See the new Tests 101,102 and 103 for
usage of the oppl pipeline.
- New renderfeatures can now be added at runtime and from LFM, ERPF_USERX have been removed, see test11/test101 for example
- new version of buildsys uses much less ram and is much faster (seconds instead of 30 minutes on some systems)

Changes in this version:
- RenderWindowWx has been integrated better, it now also processes events
- fixed post-processors to use correct mipmapping settings
- fix spot-lights direction
- added E_SAVE_SCENE_OPTIONS to CSceneManager::saveScene()
- lfm [paths] section can now contain: workrelative (same as deprecated 'addsearchpath'), apprelative and lfmrelative
- fixed test8 and it now includes decal clipping as well as portals
- lots of enhancements to scene-saving/loading
- no longer need freetype headers (and associated paths) when using lightfeather in a program
- added new version of solidworks exportscript by puh
- fixed shadowmapping for largeterrain
- fixed "make install" on linux systems
- scroll bar removed from list-box if its item count shrinks below visible lines again (thanks to calav3ra)
- fixed a bug in texture-uploading where the shadowstate was not set correctly
- renamed CSceneStateShadowMap to CSceneStateShadowReceiver
- added CSceneStateShadowCaster to be used instead of light->addShadowCaster()
- particlesystems now can have multiple emitters (multiparticlesystems), old particlesystems are deprecated
and will be removed in next version of LF
- updated ped (psys editor) to use multiple emitter psys
- fixed a problem when changing camera-controller in many tutorials
- revert rgb color scale after rendering lightmaps
- moved occlusionculling-setting to renderlayer3d because of multi-renderpipeline-support
- changed shadowmapsetup so that the shadowmaps are now handled like normal rendertargets of the camera in the shadowmapsetup
- fixed sgis-mipmap-generation for cubemaps
- fixed updateInterval calculation for shadowmap setups
- added shortcut methods litBy, castShadowsFor, receiveShadowsFrom and receiveProjectionFrom which can be used instead of
instantiationg a scenestate and adding it to a node
- guimanager::setConsumeEvents now uses troolean, defaults changed so events are consumed by the widgets normally
this also fixes the problem where the terrain in lte (terrain editor) changed when clicking on gui
- fixed gui skin rendering for windows/panels to allow for rounded rects
- guidesigner reloaded (thanks to calav3ra mostly)
- added a few more builtin shader params
- added core::stringc and std::string support in net::CDataStream
- update parent's culling prevention when adding a scenenode to its parent
- fixed sphere vs frustum classification error - thanks to magicat for finding it
- added get/setRenderTargetDepthUsage() in CCamera, to mark a rtt for use as depth buffer even if the rtt is not of ECF_DEPTH* type
- optimized CModel::doSkinning() and fixed a bug in CModelAnimator::animate() where it would wrongly return true even if no
animations were active
- added "animationupdate" key in "model" section of lfm files, to set the update interval of the model's animator
- blender exporter by default sets "animationupdate=33" (30fps) to exported animated meshes
- added option to scenemanager::remove(light, bool) to remove all scenestates for the removed light from the scene
- added support for msvs9 in buildsys
- fixed a couple of #includes to allow for cross-compilation of the engine
- fixed vector3d::getinterpolated - this fixes a problem with skeletal animations - thanks to puh for finding it
- fixed problem with relative sizes and combo boxes
- fixed buildsys for devc++
And lots of smaller bug-fixes as usual, see ChangeLog for details.

New in this version:
- added additional sample post-processors (bloom, dof and motion blur) in test11
- added os::CFileName utility class
- added CAVStreamReaderFFmpeg, which makes cross-platform video playing possible (audio not yet implemented), ffmpeg not included
- added array::quicksort which is now used as the default sorting method
- added mergesort to list
- added CConeModel
- added scenenode-scaling
- added custom node serialization support (see ISceneNodeSerializer)
- added CNGPlantFactory::getTemplateNames() to retrieve a list of all the loaded templates
- added array_refcounted, array_resource, list_refcounted and list_resource which are arrays/lists aware of crefcounted/cresource types
- added fill32Bit and drawRectangle32Bit methods by Calav3ra to CImage
- added E_TROOLEAN (and 'trool' typedef) which is an enhanced boolean with three states: yes, no and default
- added tutorial 21 - shadowmapping
- added maxquality-setting and an enum E_RENDER_RATING which allows you to have quality settings like low, medium, high when
renderpasses are selected
- added CGUIAnimator for simple animated GUI behaviour (see test4 menu for an example)
- added tutorial22 (unfinished)
- added new gui skin: clearlooks
- added test 101.SimpleOppl (all tests > 100 use the new oppl renderpipeline)
- added test 102.TerrainSkyTrees for oppl
- added test 103 normalmapping and parallaxmapping
- added CSkySceneNode to be used with skyboxes/skydomes

Known problems:
- Thirdperson-camera-controller and Editor-camera-controller seem to be broken on windows vista

Corrupted files for V0.6.0 fixed

2007-11-23T21:17:31Z

Due to a mistake on my part the files were uploaded incorrectly.

Release of V0.6.0

2007-11-23T09:27:01Z

Very important Change:
THE WAY LIGHTFEATHER IS BUILT HAS BEEN CHANGED - READ THE FILE README.TXT FOR DETAILS (or the next two news entries after this one).

Changes in this version:
- fixed a grave bug for 64bit architextures
- moved spacing, heightscale, blocksize, rendertype and lodfactors to dtc file from largeterrain constructor. also used in lte for consistency
- fixed sliders/scrollbars not showing up in simple gui
- fixed thirdpersoncontroller not working in fullscreen mode on windows
- fixed directional|spot lights Z-forward
- redid PVS to be much cleaner and better integrated with the portal system
- greatly enhanced modelviewer now in tools/ instead of in exmaples as test5
- fixed cmesh::recalculatenormals for triangle-strip meshes
- added a fix for manual changing of skeletons in models
- fixed crash when using animations in EALT_ONCE mode
- frustum for orthographic cameras now calculated correctly
- fixed off by one error when checking if 32bit indexes are needed
- fixed modelconverter to correctly set texture type for DDS and HDR textures
- fixed a problem in largeterrain when observer got out of bounds terrain was messed up
- using external renderwindows on windows-systems works better now
- the resourcemanager has been changed to support arbitrary types of resources
including user defined resourcetypes, which goes hand in hand with the addition
of user-defined sections for lfm files of V0.5.5
- the resources/ directory has been moved out of render/ into the main directory
to reflect the possibility of using it to handle other types of resources now
- changed objectType into array to have a hierarchy in CRTTI-classes
- fixed a bug in geometry loader for vertexbuffers that had already been loaded
- largeterrainmodel now cleans up properly in destructor
- CLight::addShadowCaster() checks if the node is already a shadow caster before adding it
- for shadowmap GLSL shaders, tex0 from the original material is put at texunit1 (e.g. for alpha reference)
- rendercontext-ids are now reused when contexts are destroyed and new contexts are opened -
so _LF_MAX_CONTEXTS_ is now number of maximum simultaneoulsy used contexts, not total number of contexts
- fix for big endian large terrain model
And lots of smaller bug-fixes as usual, see ChangeLog for details.

New in this version:
- added support for setting preprocessor definitions for glsl shaders
- added terraingenerator to lte
- added native wxrenderwindow
- added CFileSystem::getApplicationDirectory(), which does what it says (MAC version pending)
- added support for different shadowmap-algorithms (plugin-like system)
- added support for dyanmic environment mapping
- added LF_STATIC build option for static linking
- added EALT_ONCE_AND_DEACTIVATE animation mode to deactivate an animation after playing it (and return to the start frame)
- added png write support for ECF_GRAY16 images
- added deactivateAnimation() and isAnimationActive()
- added CGUIWidget::connectToWidget() and CGUIWidget::setAutoUpdateVariable() for easy updating of other widgets
- added Torusmodel
- added tutorial20 - loading gui from lfm, widget-connections and auto-update-variables
- added priority for scenenodecontrollers
- added pagingmanager
- added tilehandler-interface + handling in resourcemanager
- added test15 (pagingmanager)
- added core::CCommandLineParser
- added support for geometry shaders - note that constructor of renderpassopenglslcustom has changed
- added CFocusedShadowMapSetup for slightly better shadowmaps
- added support for ngplant - see test12 for an example on how to use it
- added function to search for a substring in a string (findFirstString())
- added os::CDynamicLibrary (load libraries at runtime
General:
Read README.TXT for how to build Lightfeather on windows and Linux, and Readme.mac for MacOSX.

Release of V0.5.5

2007-08-12T02:35:38Z

New in this version: filesystemhandler (use a database or an ftp-server like a normal filesystem), resourcegroups for easier resourcehandling, lfm-section parsers to integrate loading of user-defined data through the standard lfm files, support for rendering the same scene into multiple windows, write logfiles as html and much, much more.

Release V0.4.5

2007-04-09T20:29:40Z