Release Notes for Version 1.5.1

Release date: February 8, 2009

Core Engine

The shader code for terrain texturing has been enhanced for hardware supporting array textures (currently G80 and later). When texture array functionality is available, terrain now renders faster and at higher quality while also using less memory for the palette of terrain textures. Existing terrain palette textures must be re-imported before it's possible to take advantage of the new enhancements.

The method by which normal vectors for terrain geometries are calculated has been changed. Existing terrains can be updated by selecting all of the geometries in a block and choosing Rebuild Primitive from the Geometry menu in the World Editor. The shading on the terrain will change slightly when this is done because the normals are smoother in regions containing clusters of vertices.

The Round process has been added to the Shader Editor. It simply rounds numbers to the nearest integer. On hardware that does not explicitly support a round instruction, the round operation is replaced by an addition of 0.5 followed by the floor operation.

A new manager has been added to the engine: the Job Manager. The Job Manager is designed to distribute work over the available processor cores so that the engine can utilize the full potential of multi-core CPUs. Work is submitted in the form of "jobs" representing a single task of some kind. Jobs will be used for both short tasks that take place every frame and longer tasks that run in the background. Various parts of the engine will start using the Job Manager over the next few releases.

New functions have been added to the Player class that let you get and set the volume for the voice chat associated with each player.

The log file format has been upgraded. It now shows more information about the current system on which the engine is running, and more information is given when errors occur.

The Collada Importer will now recognize two sets of texture coordinates and import them. If there are two sets, then they are accessible as Texcoord 1 and Texcoord 2 in the Material Manager and the Shader Editor.