Release Notes for Build 109

Release date: June 23, 2005

• Added the PaneBoxElement interface element. This provides a tabbed box that can be used for switching among panes containing different groups of settings.

• Rearranged the material attribute settings to use multiple panes.

• Added reflection and refraction settings to the material manager. These can be used with remote portals by specifying that the image rendered a remote portal is to be directed to either the reflection buffer or the refraction buffer. There is no NV20 fallback for this functionality yet.

• Added support in the Graphics Manager and for reflection and refraction buffers. A remote portal can now indicate that what it sees can be rendered to one of these buffers instead of the primary buffer. The buffers can then be used as texture maps in the primary rendering pass so that effects like bumpy reflection and refraction are possible.

• Added a feature mask the the Graphics Manager. This allows certain rendering features to be enabled or disabled for some extra performance tuning ability on lower-end GPUs. It's also used for disabling features that aren't shown in the World Editor.

• The Unpacker class now stores the version number from the file being loaded. This allows unpacking functions to perform certain actions only if the version number is high enough so that backwards compatibility is more easily maintained.

• Changed the popup menu in the World Editor's controller assignment window to a list box.

• Added registration mechanisms for location and position markers. Types of locations and positions don't have to be registered, but if they are, the World Manager displays them in a list box now in the Get Info window.

• Renamed the Controller::Create() function to Controller::EnterWorld() to make it more clear what it's actually used for.

• This build includes an Xcode project file for MacOS X. The engine runs full-featured on the Mac, build there are some issues with Apple's OpenGL implementation that will never be resolved unless a miracle occurs and Apple starts to care about games and middleware.

• Preliminary fog functionality is now implemented as a post-processing effect. This works fine on Nvidia hardware, but currently gets stuck in a software mode under ATI drivers. We have just been informed that ATI hardware does not support copies from the depth buffer to a texture, so we need to develop an alternative. Also, there is no NV20 fallback yet.

• Finished implementing good menu bar behavior. Mouse interaction with pulldown menus now works like you would expect.