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Release Notes - SDK 1.8.0

This is a major release, with several big new features. As such,
it is likely to contain bugs.

  • 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).