News from SVN - 3D textures, shadow maps, hardware occlusion query and more

New features implemented last month in our engine:

• 3D textures (full support for X3D Texturing3D component). In particular, ImageTexture3D supports 3D textures in DDS format.
• New extensions to easily make projective texturing and shadow maps within your VRML/X3D worlds.
• Anisotropic texture filtering (by standard X3D TextureProperties.anisotropicDegree field).
• Hardware occlusion query may be activated for rendering, this can speed browsing large scenes enormously. Implemented both the basic method (see GPU Gems 1, Chapter 29) and more involved algorithm Coherent Hierarchical Culling (see GPU Gems 2, Chapter 6). view3dscene has menu options (View -> ... Occlusion Query) to try it all.
• And many other things: fixes and optimizations for GeneratedCubeMapTexture, glViewImage improvements (you no longer have to open files from command-line), S3TC compressed textures (from DDS; usable as textures, also viewable in glViewImage), sorting transparent shapes (for better blending), exit shortcut for view3dscene is Ctrl+W (escape was too error-prone).

For the brave: you can test these features already by trying the nightly builds (or grabbing source code from SVN and compiling yourself, of course).