Lightfeather 3D Engine / News: Recent posts

Changes in this version:
- New renderpipelines - one pass per light and deferred shading
- many changes and bugfixes to the GUI
- new GUI skin "simpl" by mk1
- better integration into existing renderwindows especially on windows systems
- new converters in modelconverter using assimp (assimp.sourceforge.net)
- a few new particle-affectors
- lots of other enhancements and fixes

Very important Changes:
- Lightfeather now supports the use of different renderpipelines. A second
pipeline "One pass per Light" has been included in this version, but is
still in the experimental stage. See the new Tests 101,102 and 103 for
usage of the oppl pipeline.
- New renderfeatures can now be added at runtime and from LFM, ERPF_USERX have been removed, see test11/test101 for example
- new version of buildsys uses much less ram and is much faster (seconds instead of 30 minutes on some systems)... read more

Due to a mistake on my part the files were uploaded incorrectly.

Very important Change:
THE WAY LIGHTFEATHER IS BUILT HAS BEEN CHANGED - READ THE FILE README.TXT FOR DETAILS (or the next two news entries after this one).

Changes in this version:
- fixed a grave bug for 64bit architextures
- moved spacing, heightscale, blocksize, rendertype and lodfactors to dtc file from largeterrain constructor. also used in lte for consistency
- fixed sliders/scrollbars not showing up in simple gui
- fixed thirdpersoncontroller not working in fullscreen mode on windows
- fixed directional|spot lights Z-forward
- redid PVS to be much cleaner and better integrated with the portal system
- greatly enhanced modelviewer now in tools/ instead of in exmaples as test5
- fixed cmesh::recalculatenormals for triangle-strip meshes
- added a fix for manual changing of skeletons in models
- fixed crash when using animations in EALT_ONCE mode
- frustum for orthographic cameras now calculated correctly
- fixed off by one error when checking if 32bit indexes are needed
- fixed modelconverter to correctly set texture type for DDS and HDR textures
- fixed a problem in largeterrain when observer got out of bounds terrain was messed up
- using external renderwindows on windows-systems works better now
- the resourcemanager has been changed to support arbitrary types of resources
including user defined resourcetypes, which goes hand in hand with the addition
of user-defined sections for lfm files of V0.5.5
- the resources/ directory has been moved out of render/ into the main directory
to reflect the possibility of using it to handle other types of resources now
- changed objectType into array to have a hierarchy in CRTTI-classes
- fixed a bug in geometry loader for vertexbuffers that had already been loaded
- largeterrainmodel now cleans up properly in destructor
- CLight::addShadowCaster() checks if the node is already a shadow caster before adding it
- for shadowmap GLSL shaders, tex0 from the original material is put at texunit1 (e.g. for alpha reference)
- rendercontext-ids are now reused when contexts are destroyed and new contexts are opened -
so _LF_MAX_CONTEXTS_ is now number of maximum simultaneoulsy used contexts, not total number of contexts
- fix for big endian large terrain model
And lots of smaller bug-fixes as usual, see ChangeLog for details.... read more

New in this version: filesystemhandler (use a database or an ftp-server like a normal filesystem), resourcegroups for easier resourcehandling, lfm-section parsers to integrate loading of user-defined data through the standard lfm files, support for rendering the same scene into multiple windows, write logfiles as html and much, much more.

Version 0.4.5 of the Lightfeather 3D engine has been released today.
A few highlights of the new version:
*New and much improved blender exporter thanks to par4
*Network support (enet with a few changes to make it more OOPy)
*Support for using an existing window for rendering
*Support for compressed and uncompressed 2D dds textures
*Font effects (shadow, glow)
*Procedural texture generation code for generating 2D texture maps from 3D procedural textures