Development news: Billboards, transform optimizations, UI: toolbars and hints, more

November 10, 2010
Examine navigation tooltip
Walk/Fly navigation tooltip
Billboard demo
Bridge model in engine examples
Bridge model in engine examples, another view
  • A major Transform optimization is implemented. This makes Transform animation really working at instant speeds.

  • Billboard node is implemented. Useful for sprites and such.

  • At the top of view3dscene window you will now see a nice toolbar. This provides the most important buttons — open, change navigation mode, change collisions, and view warnings (if any).

    We also clearly visualize now separate "Walk" and "Fly" navigation methods (and "None" in the menu).

    Status text (at the bottom) is also shorter now.

  • Tooltips ("hints") are implemented for our OpenGL controls.

    They are used by view3dscene to display nice description of key/mouse controls for given navigation mode — just mouse over the "Examine", "Walk", "Fly" buttons. I really hope that this is useful (for both new and advanced users), comments about how you like it are most welcome. Hopefully, this will make the navigation controls more obvious.

    Developers: you may be interested that tooltips are implemented for everything, and you can render a toolbar both in 2D and 3D. So you can e.g. position a text in 3D coordinates, over an 3D object, as a tooltip. See TUIControl.TooltipStyle, TUIControl.DrawTooltip, TKamGLButton.Tooltip.

  • Shadow maps PCF methods (in particular "PCF bilinear") look now better, because they know the correct shadow map size.

  • Headlight behavior improved, e.g. you can animate headlight spot size, and view3dscene "Headlight" menu item cooperates with VRML/X3D state better.

  • Engine documentation and examples:

As usual, you can test the new features by trying our nightly builds.