The long-awaited new version is finally there. Enjoy.
True threading support now enabled in the default build
Pipelined rendering: app, cull, and draw can run in parallel, each
in their own thread
Web plugin is more robust, and better supports Safari and Chrome
Plugin runs properly when the username contains non-ASCII characters on Windows
Added appRunner.p3dFilename and appRunner.p3dUrl to provide p3d
location
Multifiles (and p3d files) now make a distinction between binary and
text files
OccluderNode added for explicit occlusion culling
Ambient occlusion generation for terrain
Fixed bug where Windows installer wipes %PATH% when it’s too long
Added fog support to the shader generator
Added normal_gloss texture mode
Added a custom color option to the cartoon filter
Support for texture arrays in shaders
Better shader support in pandadx9
Fix some issues with cube map buffers
Can be compiled to use double-precision floats throughout, instead
of the default of single-precision floats. (Graphics drivers still
use single-precision floats, of course.)
Can be compiled with the optional Eigen library to provide SSE2 support
Can be compiled with SpeedTree support
Can be compiled on MSVS2010, and/or Win64. (These builds not
provided by default.)
Support for the Bullet physics engine
Support for the libRocket GUI library
Support for stereo/multiview textures
Substantial performance improvements to movie textures
TGA files with alpha channel now load correctly
New “Ramdisk” mount type available for the VFS
The VFS is now writable for ramdisk files and true on-disk files
pdeploy -i generates a custom icon for the installed game
wx and tk work better on OSX
Panda windows can be embedded within wxPython windows on all
platforms (including OSX) with the new WxPandaWindow class
Added base.pixel2d for pixel-based 2-D coordinates
Python-based swizzling of Panda vectors, e.g. vec2.xyxy
Python programmers can now optionally use the original unmangled C++
name for methods and classes, e.g. model.set_pos(LPoint3f(1, 2, 3)).
Command-line filename globbing now supported on Win32, e.g. egg-texture-cards *.png
DirectGui works with nonstandard coordinate-system in effect
Egg loader handles double-sided polygons a little differently by
default now, for better render performance but more memory usage
(use “egg-emulate-bface 0” to restore the old behavior if needed).
I’d like to thank not only David for his many contributions to the release, but also enn0x, who’s done an amazing job writing the Bullet integration. It’s a lot of work to write and maintain something that big, so…
Many thanks to you both, and to everyone else who contributed, for helping to make Panda3D awesome.
Congratulations! Huge thanks to everyone involved. Panda is a fantastic engine with fantastic people around it, and it’s great to see it getting even better.
There’s really not much to it, you just have to know how to create the libRocket context from Panda. Other than that, you can follow the libRocket documentation.
@preusser: you’re right, we missed it in the release notes, like many other things probably. It’s still in there, though.
I am especially happy about Bullet and libRocket, these two great additions are surely going to make building great games much quicker and more fluent.
Will Panda continue to follow a consistent version numbering? Like 1.8.1, 1.9.0, 1.9.1, then Panda 2.0? Or will Panda jump numbers over the Panda 2.0 at some point? Just curious, and I know there might be no glorious ‘plan’ or anything, I was just wondering if there is
It hasn’t been decided yet. There may be a 1.9, there may even be a 1.10 (preferably not), or we may jump right to 2.0. It depends on how development will go.
It is wonderful! There are many big features! Thank you!