Version 0.12.0 is released! You can grab the new version from the Downloads Area. The most significant feature in this release, which you can’t have failed to have heard about if you’ve been a regular around here, is the total geometry core overhaul which has led to some pretty substantial frame rate increases, but full details of the release are available in the ChangeLog, a copy of which is attached to this story for your convenience.
Please note that if you have been manually manipulating geometry structures in your application or plugin, you will need to update your code because this is in an interface breaking change for you. Details are contained in the VBO update document. Those of you who are just using the higher-level interfaces (Entities et al) do not need to be concerned by the changes in the core.
Changes since 0.11.0:
- Complete overhaul of core geometry usage resulting in optimised use of hardware vertex and index buffers, providing significant speed boosts on all cards, typically of between 50 and 200% depending on the application. ATI 9500+ cards on DirectX9 will see particularly large increases (often five-fold) due to their particular affinity to this approach.
- Geometry structures redesigned to support the above and also to provide the basis for vertex and pixel shaders. This will not affect you unless you manipulated geometry structures such as the old GeometryData directly – those who did should read about the details of the changes.
- Transparent materials no longer assume that depth writing needs to be off, this setting was causing some problems with those using alpha blending. Those of you using transparent materials which do need depth writing to be turned off will need to set it in your material scripts
- DirectX 8 rendersystem retired, the current DirectX rendersystem is now DirectX9, with legacy cards supported through the DirectX7 rendersystem or OpenGL
- Support for cubic textures and cubic reflection mapping added
- Support for DOT3 bump mapping added
- Significant speed improvements on rebuilding bezier patch surfaces, changing detail level is now a lot faster
- Binary .mesh format updated – please run ‘OgreMeshUpgrade’ (from Tools/MeshUpgrader) on your old meshes, they may not work properly unless you do this
- OgreXmlConverter now includes parameters to allow you to generate LODs as you convert
- Mesh serializer now rationalises bone assignments so that only 4 are included per vertex
- DTDs for .mesh.xml and .skeleton.xml added
- Added Gtk platform manager with support for ogre as a Gtk/GL widget
- 3D Studio Exporter now supports IK and Biped
- Lightwave converter added
- Wings3D converter added
- Memory leaks with controllers removed
- Visual real-time profiling tool added
- Many bugfixes and minor enhancements