Re: [MGengine-devel] Civitec branch

[Raphaël L. <rl...@ci...>]

New version in CIVITEC branch, used in Pro-SiVIC version 2.2.

Compilation projects:
* Grouped mgCore, mgTexture and mgEngine projects into a single mgEngine
project.
* Moved mgCameraViewport back off mgEngine project, into its own one.
* Fixed some project dependencies.
* Changed Debug compilation configuration to use incremental link (but this
doesn't work very well with such a plugin-heavy solution).

General code:
* Added more tests.
* Minor code uniformizations and deduplications.
* Added some "const" keywords where it made sense.
* Fixed many small memory leaks.
* Removed a few obsolete code, and dependency to GLU library.
* Updated boost::filesystem calls to use version 3 (aligned on commit from
June 2012).
* Updated TestXXX and unsupported texture generation projects so that they
compile.

mgEngine (general):
* mgCore now loads config files relative to the executable's path, not the
current path.
* Simplified mouse wheel management in mgCore.
* Fixed major bug in mgAddrClientSet. Operator = was incorrectly declared
(it did not compile anyway, but since it's a template class...) therefore
never used. A default operator was generated by the compiler, which of
course did not work as intended.
* Init method is now in mgObject (was previously in mgResource and
mgScriptable, separately).
* Added new class mgComponent. Such objects can be attached to scriptables
to add modular functionality or prevent diamond inheritance. An example use
is camera filters. However, development is not entirely finished (there are
some minor design flaws) and this class is currently not used.
* Fixed several bugs caused when adding scale in mgCoordFrame: mgCS_Sphere
did not correctly update sphere radius, normals were scaled during rendering
(fixed with GL_RESCALE_NORMALS), and BSP frustum culling did not take scale
into account.
* To allow fixing scale in all cases, added MaxGlobalScale method in
mgCoordFrame (instead of mgRenderable), and updated code to use absolute
value.
* Added several new mgVariant types.
* Added mgLoadShader utility files (currently not used in other mgEngine
files), as a stub for a future shader wrapper class.
* Added more empty members/accessors to mgPostProcessFilter that are not
used in other mgEngine files. We should think of a better way to implement
this in the future.
* Added mgColor structure for storing 8bit RGBA colors, with convenience
methods to convert it to/from 32bit integers, and sort them.
* Added RGBA color formats (not extensively tested) in mgColorFormat.h, and
moved depth format declarations to this file instead of mgCamera.
* Added new accessors to mgLightSource, to separately configure the light
color and intensity (scale).
* Added new operators to mgMatrix4 and mgQuaternion, also they are now
initialized to identity.
* Experimental simplification of mgVertexBufferObject and
mgElementBufferObject to work around major performance and memory issues.
Now an OpenGL object is created for each buffer object instance instead of
storing everything in a single, huge buffer. This circumvents problems due
to slow STL implementation and graphics driver assumptions/optimizations.
* mgNamedVector is now header-only to avoid getting a warning about exported
templates, and because this warning eventually and inexplicably transformed
into a link error after the buffer object change. Also, the list of
mgNamedVector objects is now stored in the mgEngine class instead of a
static mgNamedVector member.
* Added methods to obtain current user's home and AppData directories in
mgMisc.h. These are now called in main.cpp (and mgConfig, see below).
* mge-run no more creates a mgSTDConsole when run in batch mode, so that it
can quit with "quit" command in all cases.

mgConfig:
* Added ability to save a .conf file.
* References to other keys using $(key) are now evaluated dynamically.
* GetValue/SetValue now use mgVariant parameters. Previous uses of GetValue
updated to use GetStringValue.
* Added new implicit config key "user path" that points to the current
user's home directory.

mgScriptable/mgSceneObject/mgPositionable:
* Split mgScriptable into two classes: mgScriptable and mgSceneObject.
mgScriptable holds the scripting methods and is now inherited by
mgSceneObject and a new class mgComponent. mgSceneObject holds the scene
graph management.
* Added ability to attach mgComponent objects to a mgSceneObject and arraneg
them.
* Added ability to access dynamic properties (including layers).
* Fixed visitor "break" system for scene graph walkthroughs. We now use two
conditions: one for deciding whether to traverse a node, and one for
deciding whether to process it. This fixes various unexpected behaviors.
* Added new visitor conditions allowing to search for nodes that have a
given property (with any value, or a defined value),  or have a given
component.
* Added new visitor conditions allowing to combine other conditions (union,
intersection).
* Added security check when creating an object: it may delete itself in
Init(), so we detect this and return 0 (using mgAddrClient).
* Fixed bug in mgPositionable, which was due to a confusion between Parent
and PosParent. Now the mechanism is much more simple and works better.
* Fixed TransformName method, as the star replacement was performed on the
original (not transformed) name.
* Uniformized collision shape management code from mgLightMask, mgCollidable
and mgAmbientMask.

Rendering pipeline:
* Added BindChannelToTexCoords method in mgVertexBufferBindings to allow
using a texture coordinate channel that's different from the current
texture's own channel (also in mgMateriel: see below).
* Added ability to use "alpha to coverage" instead of alpha test when
multisampling is enabled. This can be configured globally in engine.conf,
and overridden in renderers (but there is no accessor yet).
* Fixed missing call to mgRenderer's BeginRender method in some of its
children's own BeginRender. This fixes bad state and context initialization
in several cases.

mgResource/mgResourceServer:
* Added PathKey declaration, to set the mgConfig key corresponding to each
resource class.
* Changed how paths are computed for resources. The PathKey keys should
contain only one path, relative to the "data path" paths. This forces all
resource to be stored in a standardized subdirectory structure, however they
can be in multiple data repositories. Resources can be referenced using only
their name (relative to the PathKey value), or with their entire path from
the "data path". To expand all these possible directory structures, we added
mgExpandPath in mgMisc.h.
* Differenciated read and write paths in mgResourceServer, as some resources
can now written to disc in Pro-SiVIC and our importer tools. Read path is
the list of possible paths for a resource class. Write path is the first
path in the list (it is created if non existent, see mgMainPath in
mgMisc.h).
* Added FileStreamRequested, ResourceLoading, ResourceLoaded and
ResourceCreated signals in mgResourceServer and resource classes, used for
GUI update.
* Cleanup and Listdata are now called recursively if a mgResourceServer is a
resource in another mgResourceServer.

mgTexture/texture generators:
* Grouped accessors to various mgTexture parameters (mipmapping, clamping,
border color...) in a single SetParameters method. Also, these parameters
are stored as members of the class and use better default values.
* mgTextureGenerator now uses the mipmapping parameter from its calling
texture.
* Forced 0 multisampling and no scaling for cubeenvironment's virtual
cameras.

mgMaterial/mgMesh:
* Added ability to duplicate mgMesh and mgMaterial resources.
* mgMesh now has an update method to apply skinning (based on bones and
weights).
* mgMaterial now has an accessor to update its emissive color (but nothing
else, we should generalize that in the future using properties).
* Added new [channel X tex coord channel] directive in mgMaterial to allow
using a texture coordinate channel that's different from the texture's own
channel.
* Added FixTextures method in mgMaterial, called after initialization. This
method checks for invalid texture parameters, issues warnings, and tries to
fix them to avoid rendering artifacts.

Various plugins:
* Fixed ForceCameraResize mthod in mgCameraViewport (did not update every
time).
* Added ability to disable simulated motion blur in mgRainActor.
* Added new properties to several classes that were previously forgotten.
* Split mgPositionController code into two classes mgPositionControllerBase
(abstract) and mgPositionController (mgSceneObject wrapper with properties).
This was done to share mgPositionControllerBase's code with another child
class (mgComponent wrapper) but the work was not completed.

Raphaël Lerbour, R&D Software Developer / Engineer
_________________________________________
CIVITEC
Bâtiment le Sésame
8 rue Germain Soufflot
78180 Montigny-le-Bretonneux
FRANCE
Tel: (+33) 1 79 92 10 57
http://www.civitec.com