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  • Plane9 v2.0 released!

    published on 2/16/2014 2:18 PM

    After almost 3 years Plane9 v2.0 have been released and I couldn't be happier that it's finally done. It goes without saying that this release took a lot more time to complete than I had planned. However on the other hand a lot of things got into this release that I initially didn't plan for since the main feature, the configuration rebuild, took a lot of time. So this is one feature packed release. I also wanted to get in any future breaking changes to the scene format in this release however I had to skip this since there is still a lot of work left. Mainly that the whole editor needs to be rebuilt to handle the new scene format in a better way so until that time the editor wont be included in the releases. Because of this all user uploaded scenes have sadly been removed from the webpage until the new editor is ready since the old scene format wont work with the new configuration window.

    The major new changes are

    • Completely rebuilt configuration
    • Transition scenes
    • Always active FXAA for cheap AA
    • Bloom
    • Sound normalization in screensaver mode
    • The software is now free so there is no need to get a license key to unlock any extra features. A big thanks goes out to all that have supported the software so far!

    A incomplete list of changes follows

    Added

    • 100+ scenes and 35 transitions
    • Engine: Support transition scenes
    • Float buffers to render textures
    • Engine: FXAA antialiasing
    • Engine: NormalDir factor. Use to create shaded particles.
    • ParticleNode: Turbulence Affect Size
    • ParticleNode: Velocity damping
    • ParticleNode: Time scale
    • ParticleNode: Color Var
    • ParticleNode: Velocity from motion
    • ParticleNode: Velocity random
    • ParticleNode: Direction
    • ParticleNode: Ribbon tail
    • ParticleNode: Option to store particle alive time in alpha
    • ParticleNode: Floor collision
    • ParticleNode: noise flow field
    • Engine: Expression: Let Spectrum average part of the spectrum
    • Engine: Globaly unique id and parent id to scene format
    • DiscNode: Add double sided and phase
    • CylinderNode: Add slices & rings, center
    • RenderToTextureNode: Float buffer support
    • CubeNode: Allow to define tessellation along X,Y and Z axis
    • Engine: High quality simplex noise functions added to shaders
    • Engine: Add better way to record a set of scenes with a specific song
    • Engine: Send in 'render size' to the shaders
    • Engine: Add destination size variables to effect nodes and 1/width,1/height in all size variables
    • Engine: Allow scenes to be tagged
    • Engine: License to scene format
    • Add crash hook so issues can much more easily be reported
    • Engine: Particle will interpolate emitter position to handle fast moving emitters
    • Engine: Spectrum values supports damping
    • CenterMeshNode
    • InvertFaces
    • TransformExNode
    • BloomNode
    • RollerNode
    • MirrorNode
    • NoiseNode
    • RandomizeNode
    • DeleteFaceNode
    • FacetteNode
    • BevelNode
    • SubdivideNode
    • ExtrudeNode
    • MeshInstancerNode
    • RenderToTextureNode: Effect input
    • LightningNode: WidthReduction
    • RenderToTexture: Possibility to change how long between each update of the ColorNext from the current Color texture
    • Config: Option to specify how often a postprocessing scene should be used

    Updated/Changed

    • Config: Remade the whole configuration window to be easier to use
    • Engine: Improved the scene randomizer so it will always go though all scenes once before being allowed to pick the same scene again
    • Engine: Default max FPS is 60hz
    • Engine: Remade the scene format to a zip compressed storage format. Also includes screenshot.
    • Engine: Increase the resolution of the Font texture to 512x512
    • Engine: gWIT, gVI now takes scaling in the original matrices into account
    • Engine: A CPU with SSE2 is required (Any cpu after 2005 should do)
    • Engine: Grass: Fixed rendering issues
    • Engine: Optimized mesh handling
    • Engine: Improved loading/saving time of scene files
    • Engine: Store screenshots in users "Pictures" folder so they can easily be found and for example used as desktop wallpapers
    • Config: Rename scene collection to "playlist"
    • Scene: Corrected the synchronous column rain behavior that occurred in the Matrix trails scene.
    • Scene: Much improved lightning in electroSphere
    • TorusNode: U mapping has been inverted so textures are applied correctly by default
    • TorusNode: Added Arc and Phase
    • Engine: Move previouslayernode to 'special' group
    • Engine: Change expression 'clip' to 'clamp' and the function of 'clamp' to 'wrap'
    • ClearNode: Default clear nodes to set alpha to 0.0
    • Engine: Occasional occurring sound capture initialization error
    • Update existing scenes to use v2.0 capabilities better
    • Engine: Handle meshes with over 65525 vertices
    • Engine: Automatically normalize the sound

    Removed

    • Editor: Temporarily removed since all shaders will be changed to GLSL in a future version
    • Config: Don't allow changing display mode. The resolution swap is too disruptive
    • CloneNode: Removed
    • Engine: Removed scene name stored in scene files. Use filename only
    • Engine: Remove camera input from RenderObject
    • Engine: Dont send detailed file statistics any more. Too much data for little gain.
    • DiscNode: Remove 'End' input

    I hope you enjoy this latest version as much as I do!