This is a significant release containing many important bug fixes and a couple of interesting new features. See the official announcement for an overview.

Rendering

• Fix single texture stage limit when gl-version 3 2 or higher is set (#1404)
• Fix some render-to-texture bugs with multithreaded pipeline (incl. #1364)
• Fix failure to unset divisor after rendering with hardware instancing
• Add “MSAA” filter to CommonFilters class as convenience to enable MSAA
• Fix multisample FBOs with MRT resolving aux target into color target
• Fix shader generator not responding to fog color changes
• Fix OpenGL error when downloading GL_LUMINANCE8 texture

Windowing

• Fix incorrect “without” event generation when mouse leaves window (#1400)
• Windows: Fix lost “up” events when dragging cursor outside window while multiple mouse buttons are pressed down (#1396)
• macOS: Fix crash with threading-model on newer macOS versions (#1286)
• macOS: Fix black screen when going fullscreen on Apple M1-based macs (#1316)
• macOS: Fix window overlapping Dock when requesting very large height
• macOS: Improve application termination handling, now sends proper exit events
• X11: tinydisplay handles window resizes more efficiently
• X11: Work around window not rendering at first on swaywm (#1087)

Deployment

• Not all code was being built with optimize level 2
• Add keep_docstrings option to switch to optimize level 1 (#1341)
• Add prefer_discrete_gpu option to force dedicated GPU on Windows (#680)
• Add bam_model_extensions for converting non-egg models to .bam (#714)
• Work around autodiscovery error when using setuptools>=61.0.0 (#1394)
• Default Linux target to manylinux2014_x86_64 on Python 3.11+

PStats

• Add support for Python profiling with pstats-python-profiler Config.prc var
• Fix PStats crash at launch from pip installs in newer Linux distros (#1391)
• Performance improvements to time-based strip chart views
• Time-based strip charts now can show start/stop count in corner of graphs
• Optimize client performance when sending a large number of samples
• Fix dropped frames by changing value for pstats-max-queue-size from 1 to 4
• Server accept clients using PStats protocol version 2.3

Assimp

• Fix assertion when loading meshes with multiple primitive types
• Add assimp-collapse-dummy-root-node option to remove root node (see #366)
• Import custom object properties as tags
• Add support for additional texture maps, including PBR textures
• Support reading tangent and binormal vectors
• Improve performance when loading geometry
• Fix problems reading external files (see #366)
• Support reading alpha mode when loading .glTF models
• Add support for texture transforms
• Add support for texture wrapping modes
• Fix memory corruption bugs

Build

• Fixes to pview.desktop file on Linux
• makepanda: Fix problems when building on arm64 on macOS without --arch flag
• makepanda: Fix detection issues with newer macOS / XCode versions
• makepanda: Fix motiontrail header files not being copied
• Windows: Fix HTTPClient not working when nativenet module is disabled
• macOS: Fix OpenCV library refusing to load in arm64 build (#1393)
• Fix compiler error when compiling for e2k (MCST Elbrus 2000) (#1367)

Miscellaneous

• Add new motion trails sample program
• MotionTrail.add_vertex() method now directly accepts a vertex position
• Significant performance optimization of C++-based motion trail implementation
• Fix race condition when destructing/constructing NodePaths in thread (#1366)
• Add implementation of capsule-into-polygon collision test (#1369)
• Fix texture transforms sometimes not being flattened (#1392)
• Fix support for #pragma include <file.glsl> in GLSL shaders
• Fix ShaderBuffer.prepare() not doing anything
• Implement deepcopy for PointerToArray
• Fix Texture deepcopy keeping a reference to the original RAM image
• Fix bf-cbc encryption no longer working when building with OpenSSL 3.0
• PandaNode bounds_type property was erroneously marked read-only
• Fix warnings when copying OdeTriMeshGeom objects
• Fix a crash when using Notify.set_ostream_ptr() from Python (#1371)
• Fix GarbageReport not working with Python 3 (#1304)
• Make mat.cols[n] and mat.rows[n] assignable
• Fix ExecutionEnvironment.args being empty on Linux
• Add various useful functions to interrogatedb module
• Fix Python 3 issues unpacking uint types in Python 3 (#1380)
• Fix interrogate syntax error with C++11-style attributes in declarators
• Fix double-precision color values not being clamped by GeomVertexWriter
• Fix regression with BufferViewer in double-precision build (#1365)
• Fix PandaNode.nested_vertices not updating properly
• Prevent Panda calculating bounding volume of Geom with custom bounding volume
• Add do_events() and process_event() snake_case aliases in eventMgr
• Support second arg of None in replace_texture() / replace_material()
• Support os.fspath() for ConfigVariableFilename objects (#1406)
• rplight: Fix PSSM calculation failing with infinite far distance (#1397)
• Remove spurious print in direct.showutil.Effects.createBounce() (#1383)
• Fix assorted compiler warnings