Enjoy, and have a happy new year!

Changes since v1.6.4:

• If Mesh::buildTangentVectors is called and causes vertex splits, and mesh had pose animation, make sure we fix up the poses too.
• Change 0 -> NULL in Dx9 Present() call, user reported issue on Intel G33/G31 GPU allegedly resolved by this (illogical, but does no harm)
• Fix a crash when trying to render a line list with stencil shadows enabled
• Deal with Dx9 device lost for hardware occlusion queries better
• Fix problem in OpenGL when mixing anisotropy levels in different texture units on the same pass
• Fix Win x64 RTC issues with timer
• Fix bug in HLSL with 3×4 matrix arrays
• Culling fixes for InstancedGeometry
• Prevent GLX ConfigDialog from creating empty dropdown elements which cause a crash when clicked on.
• Fix straggling texture unit state bug with multiple contexts in GL.
• PF_L8 is not likely to be a valid render target format on many cards, use PF_X8R8G8B8 as is the default for non-depth shadows.
• Documentation updates

Full details of the changes in this release are available after the jump.

Changes in this release:

• DirectX:
  • Fix texture samplers over #8 becoming blank after a device restore
  • Compatibility with August 09 DirectX SDK: dxerr9->dxerr in all cases (works for older versions too)
• OpenGL:
  • Fix ‘invalid enumerant’ problem (this time for good) on some cards in GL
  • When locking a sub-area of a pixel buffer, we must remember the original lock area and not just the PixelBox that is returned (which is rebased). Upload should only upload the area which was locked.
  • Fix a ‘new’ call that should have been OGRE_NEW in GLSLProgram.
  • Fix a problem in GL when using HardwarePixelBuffer::blit – it wasn’t disabling higher texture units which could cause some incorrect results in the FBO rendered version
• Root::removeFrameListener would queue up removal even if the listener wasn’t in the list yet, which could mean if you added it again it would get removed. Now it doesn’t queue the removal if the entry isn’t in the listener list already.
• Use PixelUtil::packColour instead of memset to initialise the contents of a null shadow texture. This bug could result in different results on nvidia / ati cards if this texture was floating-point
• Fix BillboardParticleRenderer calling detachobject() incorrectly.
• Fix OgreOSXCocoaView causing application crash if you save the window attributes to the preferences
• Fix leftover texture sampler settings above fixed-function units when switching between shaders using 9+ samplers and fixed-function techniques
• Fixed some edge-case issues with Resource loading and preparing in multiple threads.
• Make it unnecessary for the parent directory to be in the search path for platform-specific subfolder includes
• Correctly trap errors in FreeImage_AllocateT
• Rearrange CEGUI files to be friendly to layout editor
• Fix a crash in CompositorChain when incorrectly given a null camera
• Fix a small memory leak in Pass when shaders were used
• Thread safety for StringInterface
• Fix scene_depth_range and shadow_scene_depth_range when using LiSPSM or other ShadowCameraSetup classes that use custom matrices and don’t use a ‘real’ camera position
• Revert revision 8591, “Early-out optimisations to setMaterialName methods, to reduce their cost if the same material name is used” This actually causes problems with applications that delete & recreate materials with the same name, such as Hikari. Of course, it would be better for those apps to regenerate the material in-place instead of creating a new one but since this was breaking behaviour it needs to be undone in the stable release.
• Fix edge list memory leak in Mesh if more than one SubMesh had non-triangle geometry
• FileHandleDataStream: Don’t pass 0 to fclose.
• ZipDataStream: Don’t double-close zip files.
• Fix a bug in RibbonTrail; you couldn’t extend the number of chains from the amount that were initially created without problems, the ordering of the elements in mFreeChains was not consistent.

Full details of the contents of the release can be found in the changelog, which is reproduced after the jump. Enjoy!

• OS X
  • Fixed skewed screenshots on OS X for windows with odd width
  • FreeImage 3.9 – 3.11.0 interoperability fix; detect when FreeImage uses big-endian even on Intel Macs & use the data correctly
  • Fix uninitialised mFullScreen in Cocoa window, and expose WINDOW and VIEW custom params as with Carbon
• OpenGL
  • GLSL: gracefully handle a link error during binding of parameters, so that we do not abort the render
  • OpenGL pixel buffer: download the buffer when lock mode is anything but HBL_DISCARD, and ignore whether the buffer was created as WRITE_ONLY. For consistency with other rendersystems, WRITE_ONLY should only be a hint, and should not prevent the user reading the contents if they choose to. Previously the read buffer would always contain garbage on GL unless you removed the WRITE_ONLY, which was easy to miss because TU_DEFAULT includes it.
  • Prevent deletion of an external GL context when using currentGLContext.
  • GLSLLinkProgram::activate should not access the vertex program (for attribute mapping) without checking it exists.
  • Fixed parentWindowHandle usage for GLX
  • Disabling hardware mipmap generation on ATI/Linux as reported faulty
  • Enable/disable GL_VERTEX_PROGRAM_POINT_SIZE for point size attenuation when vertex programs available
  • Workaround for broken hardware mipmap generation on Intel 915G’s (at least – for the moment disable for all Intel chipsets)
  • Identify SiS chipsets and apply same GL automip workaround as for Intel chipsets
• Direct3D
  • Fix an edge-case in D3D9 where if _canDynamicTextures returned false, the default pool would still be used even though D3DUSAGE_DYNAMIC wasn’t specified, which doesn’t allow locking. If D3DUSAGE_DYNAMIC could not be specified, then use the managed pool in all cases.
  • Safety check before rebinding D3D9 textures after a device restore where user has destroyed render target but not texture.
  • D3D9 render texture classes had the wrong update() signature so were not protecting against device lost conditions
• Visual Studio
  • Fix for Runtime Check Failures with VC 2003 SP1 with alpha_op_ex
  • Allow OGRE to build with VC 2010, use TR1
  • Added missing OgreShadowCameraSetupPSSM.h/.cpp in VC 2003 project file
• ILImageCodec segfault fix (for those who choose to use it)
• Fix calculation of bounding radius from AABB in some places
• Fix McGuire style dark cap incompatible with multiple edge groups (stencil shadows)
• Make getCameraPosition, getCameraPositionObjectSpace and LOD camera equivalents consistent with other parameters when using camera relative rendering
• Fix dark cap clipping in stencil shadows in a few edge case conditions
• Fix the use of 2 scene managers with different settings on finite / infinite stencil shadow extrusion
• Fix Light::_getFrustumClipVolumes(…) numerical instability if infinite camera’s far clip plane is used, causing light flickering if light is near camera’s side frustum plane.
• Should propagate material scheme from primary viewport to shadow viewports so that caster/receiver materials are consistent with materials chosen for main view
• SceneManager should restore mCurrentViewport after rendering the shadow textures
• ConvexBody: only process finite AABBs (ignore null & infinite)
• Fix AABB when using BillboardSet with world coordinates and a transformed parent node
• Fix 2 typos in scripts where vertex_program should be fragment_program
• Fixed a few warnings

Fix problems with gui sample files schema validation when using Xerces Fix to fog_override parsing when using options other than ‘none’

• GpuProgramUsage::setProgramName – check the type of the program assigned matches the type of usage it’s assigned to (make copy/paste errors in scripts easier to diagnose)
• Don’t pull the AABB out of an unloaded or half-loaded Mesh – if the Mesh is being background loaded, it’s possible the AABB could be half-populated and invalid.
• AnimableValue should handle DEGREE and RADIAN types (gcc warned about this)
• Early-out optimisations to setMaterialName methods, to reduce their cost if the same material name is used
• Fix blended scene animation (previously, only one animation would successfully apply, now they can be blended)
• Fix write overflow in GPU parameters when using a (physically) 3×4 matrix – this could occur even if the param was declared as 4×4 but cast to 3×3.
• TextureUnit’s rarely-used constructor wasn’t initialising everything
• Fixed calling Root::loadPlugin twice for the same plugin caused a crash at shutdown (and also double-calling of init function)
• Return default value properly from ConfigFile::getSetting
• Fix license statement on Fresnel demo code – all samples are supposed to be public domain / free use.
• SceneManager should destroy its own shadow textures on destruction

There are lots of bugfixes as usual in this interface-stable release, see the detail after the jump for information, but in addition this is the first release which officially comes with the static link LGPL exclusion, so that you can static link under the same conditions as you would have dynamically linked previous versions, if you choose to. As usual, you can get the release from our download page.

Changes since v1.6.1:

• LGPL static link exclusion clause added to our official license terms. Static linking terms are now the same as dynamic linking.
• OpenGL:
  • Safety check before using mCurrentContext
  • Win32: Correctly restore display frequency on Win32/GL, was getting overridden after restoreConfig
  • Linux: CurrentGLContext option for GLX rendersystem should not be creating a new context.
  • ATI: Workaround for corruptions in most recent drivers with sub-buffer updates with glMapBuffer
  • ATI: fix crashes on some older cards when trying to use point sprites
  • Add support for more graceful downgrading on pre-GL 1.2 cards and other underpowered systems (Mesa should now work)
• D3D9:
  • Remove flushUpTo() call in CompositorChain::postTargetOperation; this happens after the begin/end of the scene and actually gets ignored anyway, D3D9 would bitch about this in debug mode
  • Fix a potential issue with switching from fullscreen to windowed if requested size overflows
  • Fix copyContentsToMemory in D3D9 for secondary windows
  • Allow reference device software fallback for low-end machines
• Win32: standardise the use of NOMINMAX and WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN
• Linux: Fix aclocal warnings in configure.in
• Linux: Deal with Xlib.h’s definition of ‘Status’ which clashes with ResourceGroupManager header
• OS X: OgreMemoryNedMalloc.h correctly made ‘public’ in the Copy Headers task
• GCC: Make the PCZ plugin use the gcc visibility options like other libraries
• VC7.1: Fix for threaded build, VC7.1 doesn’t have intrin.h
• VC9: Added missing ‘user’ files for VC9
• Change to the timing of dirtying a Pass hash before a material is loaded to better support threaded material population.
• Fix small potential memory leak when explicitly constructing a SharedPtr with a null pointer
• Fix a shadow map indexing bug when using pass iteration for a specific light type and multiple light types all with shadows
• Fix OverlayManager::getViewportAspectRatio, was inverted
• Return float from AutoParamDataSource::getLightCastsShadows to match declared type
• Make methods of TerrainZone virtual
• Fix off-by-one error in StaticGeometry::GeometryBucket::assign when checking number of vertices.
• Make sure aspect ratio of camera is updated when camera newly assigned to a viewport
• Propagate alpha for material and technique setAmbient and setSelfIllumination
• Fixed ManualObject’s support for 4D texture coordinates
• Fixed ManualObject transparent sorting behaviour when using ‘keep ordering’ mode
• Fix a crash when a compositor chain doesn’t have a compositor attached to it
• Default material scheme when compiling compositors, so that quad materials get assigned correctly
• Fix bug with StaticGeometry when using stencil shadows and LOD.
• Fix the GLSL ‘attach’ directive not allowing multiple attachments in one line.
• SceneManager::SceneMgrQueuedRenderableVisitor should be public, needed for SceneManager::setQueuedRenderableVisitor
• Entity::_initialise now uses needUpdate() rather than updateBounds() to update parent node so that it will work on deeper hierarchies with SceneManagers which require parent bounds to also be updated (or processed some other way).
• Fixed OpenEXR plugin build
• Fixed crashes with certain Overlay destruction orders.
• Documentation updates