Prerelease Completion / Progress post.

[darqSHADOW]

Ok, a new version of the SDK has been uploaded.  

This version is a setup update only.

This version of the setup has a few modifications:

- The DirectX DLL's are now an optional component, and are not included in the compact installation type.
- There is now a checkbox on the program group page that allows you to disable creation of any start menu icons.
- Fixed the AutoBuild to grab the proper C++ lib files -- need confirmation on this, however.
- Setup is now named setup65.exe to maintain file naming conventions across versions.

Another thing to note here, from now on you should not have to uninstall the previous version when installing a newer update.  The files should still uninstall properly, and only one Add/Remove group will be displayed.  (It will also reuse the group/dir/options you used during the initial install.)  I have also enabled the silent installer options:

/silent
Hides the wizard, but still displays a progress bar for the install.

/verysilent
No progress bar during install.

Both of these still show errors, and ask the user for some input, if you want to suppress these you can use:

/suppressmsgboxes
Hides all msgbox's and defaults the answers as follows:
  - Yes in a 'Keep newer file?' situation.
  - No in a 'File exists, confirm overwrite.' situation.
  - Abort in Abort/Retry situations.
  - Cancel in Retry/Cancel situations.
  - Yes to warnings (disk space, etc)
  - Yes to restart after install msg

/components="comma separated list of component names"
Components available are:
  - delphi
  - vb
  - dotnet
  - cppdll
  - cpplib
  - cppgcc
  - dxdll

Again, let me know if you have issues...

DS

[SylvainTV]

Small DLL fixes this week-end :

Packages
- Some package fixes
- 2D background loading can now load from package
- When the engine doesn't find a file, it tries first to look into the opened packages to see if the file exists, before failing.

Static LIB :
 - Now it doesn't initialize the CRT by default (was causing some problems in VC 2005).
 - Don't forget to compile with "Multithreaded DLL" runtimes (in project settings) else it won't work correctly

Actor :
- Added PS2.0 render path for Bumpmapping with actor. So a little slower by default but better bump quality + specular of course

Mesh :
- Fixed a problem with internal bump shader with specular and directional light.

Particles :
- Fixed ResetAll (some strange issues appeared with it)

DeviceInfo
- Removed duplicate of video modes in some cases

Milkshape 3D Exporter :
- updated for Milkshape 1.8.x
- support for multi bone per vertex added (yey finally). Maximum of 4 weighted bones per vertex as usual.
- let me know if it works 100% if you can test it.

[SylvainTV]

Hello a small release for you! Mostly bugs fixes.


Meshes :
- Added 4 more layers for meshes. It is also loaded and saved to TVM.
- These layers are only usable for your custom shaders.

Physics :
- Fixed AddMeshEx, AddActorEx, now works fine to build multi-colliders bodies.

Lighting :
- Fixed tangent frame creation for mesh and actor.
- Please test bumpmapping on mesh and actor, to see if it looks better.

Font :
- Made sure that the system font does not get deleted.

Texture factory :
- Updated a little the way of loading textures when a texture already exists with the same filename or name.
- Added DumpAllToDebug  to list all textures in debug file or debug console.

Particles :
- Fixed a small bug with emitter keyframes
- Added get bounding functions.

Path :
- Fixed Bicubic interpolation, now works better.
- Added CatmullRom interpolation to path
- Readded CameraSpline function from 6.3
- Added GetcurrentPathNode for Mesh, Actor, Camera

Misc.:
- Added a system of Search Directories for all file loadings.
- TV.ClearSearchDirectories ,TV.RemoveSearchDirectory, AddSearchDirectory.
- Fixed Screenshot : Now you can also save to PNG and DDS.

[darqSHADOW]

I just finished uploading the latest builds, as well as the updated setup files.  You will now see 3 seperate setup files, Full, SDK, and Tools/Plugins.  The full setup contains everything that is in the other two files, so you do not need to download all three unless you want to help test the installs.

There are many new start menu shortcuts in the full setup now, including direct links to the templates for new users, and new PDF's for getting started.  Many of those are placeholders right now, and the plugins guide is not yet complete -- I am working on finishing those up this weekend and will update accordingly.

The full setup also now includes the initial test of TV3Demo!  You should be able to view the sample scene that was included, and the framework is in place to start writing your own .Net plugins -- no more having to deal with creation of the initial TV objects or handling the full input/render loop for quick tests.  It also means we have a standard framework for new users to view demos once we get into open release!  The configure portion of TV3Demo is incomplete, so you can exclude using that in your plugins for right now.

This release also includes a new build of the SDK, I will let Sylvain update the changes on that in a later post.

If you find issues with the installers please let me know -- any little annoyance would be great to hear, as the faster we knock out these final items, the sooner we can get into open prerelease.  Enjoy!

John

[SylvainTV]

So Prerelease is finally here !

A little change log for the latest changes in the TV6.5 dlls :

License system
- No more Betakey, nor LicenseKey. Please read the documentation in the SDK to know how to unlock the DLL and be able to release a product to the public. License Sign application is available on Members page.
- Added TVEngine.SetLicenseFile


Actors :
- Some ImportAnimations bugs are fixed. This function is not so strict as before. Only the bone names are important now. You will probably have to reexport animations though.

Rendersurface :
- Added MultiRenderTarget support to the RenderSurfaces.
- This DX9 technique allows to render on several rendersurfaces at the same time. Only one depth buffer is created for these different rendersurfaces.
- To use this, you need to create a multirendersurface with Scene.CreateMultiRenderSurface function. It allows to create up to 4 simultaneous rendersurfaces.
- You can only draw with custom pixel shaders : the pixel shaders must write to the COLOR0, COLOR1 , COLORn semantic.

Particles
- Fixed a problem when saving/exporting to TVP. Please reexport all particle effects if you had weird crashes with the exported TVP.

ATL/COM Wrapper :
- Fixed some problems with functions returning Nothing/NULL objects. Now these returned objects will be also Nothing/NULL in VB6 or Delphi.

Plugins/Tools/TV3Demo :
- Recompiled and retested all executables, now without SetBetaKey.

3DSMax Plugins :
- Max7, 8, 9 exporters now export correctly the materials value even when there is a texture.

Text manager
- Fixed crashes when passing empty strings

Miscs :
- Added TVEngine.SetREFMode to be able to init the engine with the Reference Rasterizer, can be useful to study your application with graphic profilers.
- Removed TVBitmapParts, TVOctree, TVTilemap which are not used.
- Fixed some memory leaks.
- Added +=, -=, etc. support to the C++ tv_types.h
- Added GetTag/SetTag/Userdata functions to some classes.

[SylvainTV]

Hello, a new release tonight

Automatic Build process :

- The automatic builder machine has been upgraded with VS2003 SP1. This will probably lead to some speed ups
- Some problems in setups have been fixed. Now all dlls correctly overwrite the old versions, DirectX install & DLL registration is silent.
- Added an autoversionning for the dlls.


Developer License :
- You can now put the license file in document & settings\[user]\Local Settings\Application Data\
 (LOCAL_APPDATA path). This helps in some server environment which duplicates files in My Documents.


TV3Demo :
- Some bugs have been fixed.

Physics :
- Quite a lot of additions in this build.
- Multiple World / Multiple simulation : you can now run simultaneous Newton simulations (totally independant).
- Added CreateNewSimulation/SetActiveSimulation/GetActiveSimulation/DestroySimulation
- All bodies/joints/materials/vehicles can only be in ONE simulation.
- You switch between each simulation with SetActiveSimulation call. You must update each simulation each frame.
- Added Ray collision support (like for mesh and actor), it's called AdvancedCollision and it works as for the other objects. Collision is checked on the body colliders.
- Added ComputeAccurateInertia : currently the engine uses a box to compute Inertia, this gives usually a good result. However if you need to compute inertia precisely according to the Newton colliders, you can now use ComputeAccurateInertia(bodyid).
- Added EnableCPUOptimizations. CPU optimizations are used by default but now you can disable them. Disabling CPU optimizations can be useful to get exactly the same simulation on every computer.

Scene :
- Added RenderAllActors and RenderAllParticleSystems
- Now all the .Render functions forces the render even if the object is disabled.
- .Enable state is only used when using RenderAll/RenderAll** methods.

Actors
- Specular lighting is now supported in per vertex lighting using shader mode.
- It should be 99% like the T&L specular.
- Warning : due to the big number of instructions that this shader needs, this new specular lighting only work with shader model 2.0. The engine will fall back to no specular if the card doesn't support vertex shaders 2.0

Meshes :
- Added LAYERMODE enumeration for Mesh.SetTextureLayer
- Fixed a tiling problem with AddWall3D
- Working on a solution to allow AddVertex/AddFace etc.. on a loaded model.

AI System :
- Added FindGridPathEx and FindNodePathEx. These functions return the result of the path search in an array (and not in the TVPath class)

Camera :
- Added some more checks to avoid memory leaks and crashs for queries.
- Added OccQuery_GetMaxQueries()

Particle system :
- Added Enable function.
- Added GetEmitterKeyFrame to return the current key frame for an emitter (only works when the emitter has keyframes obviously)

2D system :
- Fixed DrawTextScaled (the scale was not applied on newlines)
- Fixed Draw_Custom. Now should work as expected. Just don't use more than 350 vertices for now
- Added Draw_Box3D and Draw_Box3DEx to draw bounding boxes like the ones rendered with Mesh/Actor.ShowBoundingBox.

Minimeshs
- Added helper functions to know the number of faces and vertices of one minimesh item.

Misc.
- Added the standard SetTag/GetTag/SetUserData/GetUserData that was missing in some classes.
- Fixed some things in the C++ interface and Managed interface.