Finally, the much delayed and long promised 1.6.0 release has arrived. This is an experimental release, and since there are very likely to be bugs, it’s not recommended for production use.
Anyways, here are the new features (plus bugfixes):
Lightweight threading framework without runtime overhead
Makepanda now fully supports OSX
DDS textures are now supported
COLLADA->egg converter added
New C+±based Task system, which includes async threading support
Support for asynchronous on-demand loading of textures and/or animations
New software-based renderer “tinydisplay”
More pythonic features: iterable methods, implicit parameter casting
Packpanda now also supports Linux
Added libsquish support for DXT compression
New MeshDrawer class for realtime mesh manipulation
Infamous FBO bug fixed
Preliminary support for Volumetric Lighting
Shader k-parameters can now contain underscores
Fixed OpenCVTexture and ARToolKit on Linux
GeoMipTerrain now supports multi-channel heightmaps
GeoMipTerrain features new near/far LOD system
GeoMipTerrain performance improved
CallbackNode added to support low-level drawing callbacks from Python
Fixed some minor but annoying OpenAL/FFMpeg issues
Fixed bug with lcontrol and rcontrol on Linux
Fixed bug regarding icon filenames
Multisampling fixed on Linux and OSX
Left and right scrolling events now available
Several improvements to API reference
ShaderGenerator now supports several more blend modes and color scale
.x converter now supports AnimTicksPerSecond
vfs-mount-url can load models directly off the web
Smoother transitions in FadeLodNode
Dynamically-generated outline on fonts: loader.loadFont(outlineWidth = xxx)
Texture.getRamImageAs()
base.toggleTexMem()
Text generation performance optimization
Various performance optimizations
Several more minor bugs fixed
Plus some other things I forgot to write down.
If you visit the download page, you can see that Mac OSX binaries have been added, too. Plus, a CHM version of the manual.
great work! THX downloading
[EDIT] first bug found:
when trying to run the firefly demo under linux,ubuntnu 8.04 32bit, gf8600gt 173.14.12 driver (i know its not up2date)
starting the firefly demo takes a loong time. after that i get corrupted grafical output and the following console output.
:display:gsg:glgsg(error): at 3541 of panda/src/glstuff/glGraphicsStateGuardian_src.cxx : GL error 1282
it runs fine except for broken visuals. at first you only see a few bright pixels. if you increase the size of the fireflies you can see something like that:
wow, very extensive list of additions, what a nice thing to see right as I’m starting to use Panda. There are two items on that list that are particularly interesting sounding to me, could you maybe elaborate a bit on them?
I don’t know if discussing how features work should go in a new thread.
ThomasEgi, I can confirm the Fireflies bug here. I’ll put it on my todo-list.
Read here: panda3d.org/apiref.php?page=Loader#loadModel
If you specify a callback argument to loadModel or whatever, it will be loaded asynchronously and the callback will be called whenever it’s finished loading. There are also functions like asyncFlattenStrong which work asynchronously, in a different thread.
The MeshDrawer is a class that’s part of treeform’s Pyro library. (which is in the forums).
:util(error): Unable to open /etc/Confauto.prc
:util(error): Unable to open /etc/Config.prc
Known pipe types:
wglGraphicsPipe
(all display modules loaded.)
:gobj(error): Texture::read() - couldn't read: /c/Panda3D-1.6.0/samples/Media-Player/PandaSneezes.avi
:gobj(error): Texture "/c/Panda3D-1.6.0/samples/Media-Player/PandaSneezes.avi" exists but cannot be read.
DirectStart: Starting the game.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Panda3D-1.6.0\samples\Media-Player\Tut-Media-Player.py", line 81, in <module>
w = World()
File "C:\Panda3D-1.6.0\samples\Media-Player\Tut-Media-Player.py", line 26, in __init__
self.tex = loader.loadTexture(MEDIAFILE)
File "C:\Panda3D-1.6.0\direct\showbase\Loader.py", line 519, in loadTexture
raise IOError, message
IOError: Could not load texture: PandaSneezes.avi
Ah. On Linux, loader.loadTexture didn’t return a MovieTexture, but an FfmpegTexture, so I was unaffected. I’ve changed it to use MovieTexture.read.
About the actual problem: drwr, you have made some changes to the way (do_)read was overloaded, right? Did you maybe forget to change the grutil/movieTexture.* files?
Well… it does involve some major changes to Panda, while subreleases should usually be minor changes and bugfixes only. But I guess I could make an exception, if I get it done soon enough.
Woohoo! Congratulations everyone, and thank you very much for all the work put in!
I do have a question:
You mention “Smoother transitions in FadeLodNode” - does that include the handling of normal mapping (which I think that I recall was in place in CVS when last I heard), and either way, what, if anything, else does that include?
It already looks nice… We are waiting for it sooo much!
Finally…