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Release Notes - SDK 1.10.0

This is a major release with significant changes. Please review the
changes when upgrading. The list below is by no means exhaustive, but
should contain the most important changes.

General

  • Experimental ability to build for Android
  • New input framework to natively support gamepads, joysticks, etc.
  • Multi-threaded render pipeline is a lot more stable now
  • New setuptools-based deployment pipeline
  • Improvements to mouselook smoothness
  • Cache is now at $XDG_CACHE_HOME/panda3d (~/.cache/panda3d), not ~/.panda3d
  • Addition of unit test suite
  • Many improvements to thread safety
  • Many performance improvements
  • Tons of bugfixes
  • Big style cleanup of C++ source code

Python API

  • Complete support for Python 3
  • Support for coroutines and async/await
  • Property interfaces have been added for many settings
  • More flexible handling for keyboard arguments in C++ APIs
  • Python bindings are completely separated out of the C++ libraries.
  • Interrogate binding generator has many improvements.
  • Use of pandac.PandaModules is discouraged, use panda3d.core et al
  • Use of libRocket is discouraged due to lack of Python 3 support
  • Tasks are now sorted in addition order when lacking a sort value
  • Fixes iris/fade transitions for extreme aspect ratios
  • WeakNodePath is now exposed to Python
  • WindowProperties.size(x, y) deprecated; use WindowProperties(size=(x, y))
  • Calling bare run() is deprecated, use base.run() instead
  • downcastTo*() methods have been removed, they were already no-ops

Rendering

  • Add new shader-based terrain rendering method (ShaderTerrainMesh)
  • The default ColorAttrib mode is now T_vertex
  • The ColorAttrib T_off mode now properly disables vertex colors entirely
  • Make handling of color attributes more consistent between renderers
  • Ability to create an OpenGL core profile context; set “gl-version 3 2”
  • Experimental support for reverse-Z rendering for best depth precision
  • sRGB framebuffers supported more widely
  • Support for infinite near/far clip in lens
  • Add some PBR material parameters to material class
  • Addition of more built-in GLSL shader inputs; see manual.
  • Add p3d_FragData[] GLSL output for MRT in GLSL 1.30
  • Add flag enabling vertex shader control over point size
  • Support signed ints and double-precision floats in vertex data with GLSL
  • Support unsigned 11/10/10-bit floating-point textures and vertex data
  • Support for SSBOs via ShaderBuffer class
  • Support OpenGL FBO buffers without any attachments
  • Support passing uint variables to GLSL shader
  • Allow rendering objects with empty vertex data (for vertex pulling)
  • Add LogicOpAttrib, for supporting logical operator blending
  • Improvements to OpenGL ES support
  • Support for geometry with adjacency information
  • Change default alpha blending to improve blending rendered result
  • New method for obtaining native OpenGL texture object
  • Support windowless offscreen rendering on macOS
  • Panda resets OpenGL state better before and after draw callbacks
  • OpenGL renderer better supports debugging tools like apitrace
  • Support fixed-depth billboards, useful for 2D tags that don’t change size

Shader generator

  • Significant performance improvements
  • Support for point light shadows
  • Hardware skinning support
  • Changes to match fixed-function pipeline better
  • Fixes for normal vector normalization
  • Support multiple normal maps (uses Reoriented Normal Mapping)
  • Tracks modifications to materials and texture stages automatically

Lighting

  • Allow specifying light color based on color temperature
  • Setting specular color of a light separately is deprecated
  • New GLSL inputs to make implementing lighting in shaders much easier
  • Add representation for sphere light and rectangle light
  • Efficiency improvements for passing light information to shader
  • Interocular distance for shadow cameras now always defaults to 0
  • Add low-level lighting module from RenderPipeline

Textures

  • Support cube map arrays
  • Support buffer textures
  • Many more texture formats supported
  • BC4 and BC5 compression modes supported
  • Proper depth textures supported in DirectX 9 renderer
  • set_ram_image(_as) directly supports buffer protocol
  • TexturePeeker supports more formats and component types

Text

  • Dramatic improvements to text rendering performance
  • Support for HarfBuzz for higher-quality text shaping and kerning
  • Support for right-to-left text
  • Support for signed-distance-field rendering in egg-mkfont

Audio/video

  • The default unit for audio is now 1 meter for each Panda unit.
  • Native .flac loader
  • Support videos with alpha channel in ffmpeg
  • OpenAL stability improvements, especially on macOS
  • Support loading .opus files with libopusfile
  • Fix various memory leaks

Physics / collisions

  • CollisionTube is renamed to CollisionCapsule.
  • Box-box collision test is improved to work well with the Pusher
  • More box tests for collision system: box-into-plane, box-into-poly
  • Capsule (tube) can be used as “from” shape into plane, sphere, capsule, box
  • Bullet objects are serializable to .bam files.
  • Bullet bindings are now thread safe.
  • Bullet debug drawer is more efficient; no longer inherits GeomNode.
  • Various fixes to bullet vehicle wheel synchronization
  • PhysX bindings are deprecated.

Pipeline / loading

  • Support for Assimp library to load a broad variety of model formats
  • Ability to specify min-lod, max-lod, lod-bias in .egg file
  • Egg file materials support PBR-style material parameterization
  • Support loading more DDS files, including DX10-style ones
  • Add support for OpenEXR and HDR textures
  • Support line/point thickness in bam2egg
  • bam2egg no longer inserts a vestigial ModelNode at the top
  • bam2egg supports depth test, offset, cull bin attributes
  • Accept a .gz file wherever a .pz file is accepted
  • egg-palettize supports mirror and border-color wrap modes
  • More robust checks against memory corruptions when loading bad .bam files
  • Support for Maya 2017 and 2018
  • Support preprocessing GLSL shaders created with Shader.make

Build

  • We now require using MSVC 2015 or 2017 to compile on Windows.
  • At least GCC 4.8 is now required.
  • With GCC/clang, enabling C++11 is now required.
  • Allow building with more recent ffmpeg versions
  • Support for old FFMpeg versions (before 1.1) dropped.
  • The ppremake build system has been removed.
  • Support for OpenSSL versions before 0.9.7 has been dropped.

C++

  • Use of NULL is replaced with nullptr
  • WeakPointerTo now requires use of lock() method for thread safety
  • Mutex et al now satisfy C++11 Lockable constraints
  • Panda headers no longer contain `using namespace std;`
  • PN_int32 et al have been removed, use stdint.h types instead
  • The need to link with pystub and add Python include dirs is removed.