This release took much longer than expected ... :-)
- We are going to give a talk at GDC during the GPU Summit day. It will cover our skydome system Ephemeris 2: GDC 2020 Ephemeris
- We will also have a user group meeting during GDC: The Forge User Group
- A new resource loader can now stream textures, buffers and additionally geometry (extracted from glTF) asynchronously. We replaced assimp with this loader to save compile time and space on GitHub. We still use assimp for our internal tools. Here are the underlying design principles of the resource loader:
- Generally glTF is just a geometry container for us. We do not apply any of the underlying principles like material or mesh or scene management that it offers because they are not tailored to our needs. The resource loader only loads a glTF file, extract its geometry and stores this data (including hair and ozz animation system data) in a vertex and index buffer stream.
- All texture loading and material loading is the responsibility of the app. Scene partitioning or material support is not used from glTF. Those remain on the App level. Each app has its own lighting and material models and it shouldn't be restricted to the very limiting architecture of glTF
- There is no glTF code in any of the unit tests or app examples with the exception of the glTF viewer. The resource loader loads geometry just with a addResource call as it loads textures and buffers ... it can generate a vertex and index buffer stream with offset values for draw calls or for ExecuteIndirect ...
- All model art assets were converted to glTF
- libzip was replaced with zip because it is easier to maintain.
- Console support: at the end of last year before our three week break, we made the PS4 and Switch run-times ready to ship games (we will see first games shipping this year). We also started on the PS5 and XBOX One Series X support. You need to be an acredited developer to receive the source code for any consoles. We will be asking the console owner for permission before we would provide you with any source code. That means you have to be part of their developer program.
- Improved Windows 7 support: one of the games TF is launching with requires Windows 7 support. This means we are now testing the Windows 7 run-time more rigourously and committed fixes with this release
- Math library: added missing vec2 functions
- Updated copyright statement
- Resolved issues on GitHub:
- issue 162 - 13_UserInterface - Crash
- issue 161 - 18_VirtualTexture breaks with dx and vk: only fairly decent cards support virtual textures. We added tracking support in the *.cfg system and throw an error message when the GPU doesn't support the feature.
- issue 124 - Missing KeyKpAdd mapping