Truevision3D - Community Forums - New Release (October 31st 2009)

Hello !

New TV3D setups have been uploaded to the webserver.
You can get them from the downloads page.

New features/change log

Licensing :
- Warning : We changed the way the developer license works, it's likely all programs will crash until you regenerate the dev license with the newest license generator (the new version will be available on the member page later today, sorry for the inconveniance)
- Most hardware-based licensing problems should be fixed after license regeneration.

Setup :
- TV3Demo was removed temporarily from setup, a brand new version will be available soon
- Fixed D3DX DLL installation.

Engine :
- Each viewport now uses the multisample level : the antialiasing works on all viewports
- The engine is now built with Aug2009 DirectX SDK. It means that it uses the D3DX9_42.dll and D3DCompiler_42.dll now. Your application won't start or compile shaders if one of these dlls are not present on your system.

Landscape :
- Added holes support ( does not work with LOD however ), you can make some triangles disappear !
- Works by creating specialized index buffer for chunks with holes
- See SetTerrainHoleArray, SetTerrainHoleList, SetTerrainHole, EnableTerrainHoles functions
- You can preserve collision with the holes (or not)
- Can be saved via SaveTerrainData and loaded via LoadTerrainData

Particle systems :
- Added several new emitter parameters especially to control minimesh emitter and randomize parameters
- See SetEmitterPower & SetBillboard
- Added SetMiniMeshRotationScale to control minimesh emitters
- Added
SetEmitterSpawnInterpolation to control the spawn of particles during one frame. False : emit everything at the emitter position. True : interpolate emitter position between 2 frames resulting in smoother particle spawning. T
- Added GetEmitterPower
- Fixed minimesh particle emitters.

Minimesh :
- Fixed crash issue with SetMatrix
- Optimized SetGlobalPosition

Entity
- Fixed scale problem when using SetMatrix (resulted in wrong rotation matrix)
- Added a OrientActor parameter to Actor, Mesh and camera SetPath functions. This allows to only update position based on the Path but not change the orientation of the mesh.

Mesh
- Line or Point TVMeshs are now correctly saved/loaded to TVM.
- Fixed some issues with Point Sprite TVMeshs default

Actor
- Fixed WeldVertices and added parameters to it.
- Fixed a problem with not increased texture references when duplicating an actor

Shader manager
- Now can compile text shaders from package/memory stream.

Package system
- Delete is now working
- Deleting a file just flags it deleted, remove it from file list but it stays stored on the disk.
- If you want to restore the space of deleted files, you must use CompactPackage.
- Added CompactPackage : this recreates the package totally and replace the old one. Make sure that the package file and the folder is writeable and not protected. Warning : this step can be slow for big pacakges.
- Fixed random direction problem for particle spawns.

Text
- Rewrote text rendering which can result in a 400% speed increase in best cases
- Works also for 3D billboard text
- fixed a problem with international 3D billboard text.
- Fixed a memory leak with TVMesh.Create3DTExt

Physics :
- Updated to Newton 2.07

- Multithreaded & Multicore Physics
- Physics simulation will normally be much faster now !
- Added SetMaxEventCount, SetMultiThreadSolvePerIsland, SetThreadCount, InvalideCache new functions.
- Lots of bugs fixed on the Newton side.

Warning :
- Since the change to Newton 2.0, Vehicle interface of TVPhysics WILL NOT WORK in this version. Make sure you don't rely on vehicle system before using this version. Vehicle system will be resumed when a Newton 2.0 version with vehicle support arrives.

- Everything should work as before else. If not, please tell us.

Plugins :
- New Max plugin for Max 2010.

Misc :
- Fixed some .NET wrapper issues.

If you see outstanding issues, please tell us !