Release Notes for Build 145

Release date: November 27, 2007

• Implemented a new GUI rendering system. For details, see the wiki article about Creating a GUI Skin.

• Added a radio button interface element as the RadioButtonElement class.

• Cameras now have a new flag to indicate that they may temporarily move outside their owning zone. This is useful in such cases as a camera mounted on a gun that's attached to a character. A similar flag has existed for lights, and now both flags are exposed in the Get Info dialog.

• A new concept of "perspective" has been worked into the engine, and this refers to the kind of viewing position the scene is currently being rendered from. There are currently four perspectives defined: direct, reflection, refraction, and camera. The direct perspective pertains to the scene as it is rendered directly from the main camera, the reflection and refraction perspectives pertain to the scene as it is rendered through remote portals, and the camera perspective pertains to the scene as it is rendered through a camera item in an interface panel. Multiple perspectives can be in effect at the same time; for example, the reflection in a water surface seen through a panel camera.

• Geometries and fog spaces can now be excluded from each of the four perspectives by setting flags in the Get Info box. (The flags for a geometry appear under the Node tab.) For geometries, the visibility of shadows can also be controlled independently.

• A new flag has been added for remote portals that enables recursive rendering. By default, this flag is off, so a remote portal will not be rendered again if you are already looking through that portal.

• When shadow maps, cube light projections, spot light projections, or ambient space maps are generated, they are now written into the same virtual directory that contains the world resource from which they were generated. Any subdirectory names in the resource path are relative to the top-level virtual directory.

• Added the GetImportResourceCatalog() function to the SceneImportPlugin class and the GetExportResourceCatalog() function to the SceneExportPlugin class to let the plugins specify what catalog to use for import or export.

• Added some resource caching optimizations.

• A lot of work has been done to move the PS3 rendering code to a much lower-level system. The Graphics Manager now minimizes use of the GCM library and instead uses custom code to build command buffers. This allows the C4 rendering code to be as fast as possible, and it gives C4 access to more hardware features than are available to other PS3 games.