What's New in v0.9.7 (Beta 7)

• Details coming soon.

What's New in v0.9.6.x (Beta 6)

• Details coming soon.

What's New in v0.9.5 (Beta 5.0)

Terrain Rendering and Editing:

• Many Terain tool quirks have been eliminated, to provide hours of editing fun!
• "Ctrl+Z / Undo" capability for the main morphing and painting functions, so you can easily undo your mistakes!
• Immediate Terrain 'Preview' Mode to allow work flow to toggle instantly between Terrain edit mode and Run mode.
• Enhanced Terrain Visual representation (e.g. Bumps, specularity, and overall enhancement).
• New Camera Manipulation logic for Terrain Editing mode that enable faster navigation of the scene and convenient centering on the paint brush.
• Terrain Editing brush precision logic (and helps prevent accidents).
• Lost Isle 3 has been repainted with our tool set to demonstrate these capabilities.
• Dual-ring brush to visualize "hardness" rating.
• Elegant hot keys for rapidly changing brush settings, type, and modes, without leaving the render window canvas.

Physics

• More automated integrations, built right into SceneObject.
• Physics can now be defined for Models, which is inherited automatically by the Actors that use that model!
• Moveable platform supported, now demonstrated by the Galleon ship in Lost Isle 3.
• Procedural Plant Physics! (demonstrated in Lost Isle 3 Landcover)
• Integration with Design Mode, so that you can place objects on top of physical objects that are defined as "ground surfaces" (e.g. the bridge in Lost Isle 3, or even the Galleon ship). You can also "stack boxes" in design mode very efficiently.
• Many bug fixes, so that in even more ways the physics "just works".
• Performance enhancements to allow you to put more physics into your scene without slowing it down.
• Easier to use automated physics. Design mode now respects your physics shapes, allowing you to do easy stacking of objects.
• Physics visualizers can be toggled on/off from tool strip button in any both design and run modes.
• New physics object types - Sensor and CollisionObject
• New Physical Class allows easy configuration of object with single drop down selection (e.g. "Character"). (Options are "StaticEnvironment", "Obstacle", "MoveablePlatform", "Character", "Vehicle", etc.
• Automatic generation of Convex Hull collision shape for each model.
• Many improvements for Model Physics Settings editor (e.g. "Visualizer", new collision shapes, and compound shape editor).

Architect Toolset and Design Mode Controls

• Dramatic Improvements in Design Mode manipulations, with grouping and flexible manipulation options. You can now "duplicate/copy" groups in scene with amazing ease and speed.
• Undo capability for many operations (e.g. add, delete, and positioning of objects).
• Object Editor enhanced, with ability to navigate backwards rapidly to previous selections
• Easy toggling on of various Design visualizers (such as Physics and Paths).
• Light Visualizers and controls.
• Improvements in sub-selection of complex composite actors.
• Much cleanup of presentations in Object Editor and the Explorer panels.

Cinematics and Pathing

• Enhancements to run-time operation in these modes.
• New group path finding AI example has been included in the Tech Demos.
• New paths and cinematics have been added to Lost Isle 3 for demonstration.
• Bug fixes (e.g. path changes made run-time are now respected instantly).
• Visualizers for this can be toggled On/Off from the tool strip in both Design and Run Mode.

Overall

• XNA 3.1 Migration is complete! Underlying logic has been altered to take advantage of this.
• Automated Skeletal Animation Transitions for smoother transitions between animations! (procedural timed interpolations)
• Installer enhanced, which should produce a higher success rate among new users (the first download with installation of dependencies is the hardest part).
• Some New World Creation quirks have been fixed.
• At least 100 bug fixes not mentioned here.

What's New in v0.9.3 (Beta 3.3)?
Beta 3.3.1

1. Terrain Tools are functional for importing terrains, morphing the heightmap and painting it.  You can Import your terrains from external tools now!

   NOTE:  There are memory issues that can crop up, and so restarting Visual3D after every major operation is recommended (e.g. Build Terrain, or Generating the Splatting Altas).

2. Keymaps are now a global World setting (click on World Node in World Explorer, then edit the Key Maps from there.)
3. Ability to configure User Controls to trigger custom Model Animations for your own models (without coding).
4. Baseline cut of Particle Editor!
5. Enhancements to Physics (more detail soon!)
6. Many Enhancements to the overall Toolset (specifics to be added soon).
7. Tutorials added and more being added this week, to show you how to accomplish new cool things with Visual3D.
8. Gui Editor functions (but without saving).  This is a good preview of what is to come in the next release, which will enable you to layout and save your own GUI's.
9. Create New World *really* works now, and allows you to create multiple new worlds, each with their own unique name.
10. Camera Cinematic Editor (see video tutorial from Darth Hunter)
        A convenient way of the camera path recording.
        Various ways of editing of the recorded paths. (visual, first person, property grid)
        Possibility to edit Field of View.
11. Support of scripts in an Asset Explorer:
        Addition, editing and deleting through an Asset Explorer.
        Possibility to execute scripts from an Asset Explorer.
        Possibility of restart of executing task-scripts.
        Work of the script text editor is accelerated.

Known Issues for V0.9.1 (Beta 3.1):

1. Won't install on some Non-English Installations of Windows/Vista (e.g. German). 

   Solution:  As "Admin" you must create a new user group called "Users".  See this post for more details.

Known Issues for V0.9 (Beta 3.0):

• Don't use the "Terrain" tab at top. This should have been removed for this release as it shows the old terrain tools that have become obsoleted (and now are buggy too). If you select this tab, it will show you tools that will cause error dialogs to show. Use the "EarthBuilder" tab and tool set that exists for it. For Beta 3.0, it's still awkward, incomplete and has some bugs, but we've got a team working on this toolset until it's fixed and finished.
• Lost Isle 2 scene may run slowly for lower end PCs and graphics cards. To help with performance, you can press F6 and select "Middle" or "Low" graphics quality settings. Also, you might want to disable Anti-Aliasing, as well as Advanced Skies to see how this helps out. You can use the Terrain Console to vary the density of vegetation too. Set your resolution to 800x600 for higher performance too. Higher end systems will run Lost Isle just fine.
• While Scene Editing (Design Mode) the first attempt to set focus on an object will cause an Error Dialog to appear. Click "Cancel" (don't submit this error to us, we already know about it and have it fixed!), and then try it again. It only shows an error for the first object that you do this for. After that, it works just fine.
• Crashes when you take camera below the water, showing a windows application error. This seems to only happen on some Vista systems, and we have not resolved it yet, but we are committed to resolving it for v0.9.1 (Beta 3.1) next week.

 
Optional Patch for Beta 2.4 is available for Vista64 users only.
To learn more about the "Texture Browser Crash" Bug, Visit this Forum Thread and see if it applies to you. So far, this bug seems to only affect *some* Vista64 users. If you are a non-Vista64 user and experience this same problem, please response to this forum post and let us know.

Changes for each Beta Release:
What's New in Beta 2.4:

1. Bug Fixes for all reported bugs from Beta 2.3 (if you reported a bug with 2.3 on our forums, you should expect to find it fixed in Beta 2.4.
2. Enhancements to LandCover feature, making it more fine tuned, performant, flexible, and gorgeous.
3. Model & Material Editor Upgrades! New capability added for LOD generation and configuration, and more optimizations/fixes for the art path as you import your own models into Visual3D scenes.
4. Physics Upgrades! Check out the enhancements to the physics demos, which are more fun than ever, and also we have Vehicle physics working inside GIS2 terrains.
5. GIS2 Terrain System Maturations! We've made some quality and performance gains with this release. Our goal is to make our GCM/GIS2 Terrain system be usable for most game genres, as well as for real-earth full-globe terrain rendering.
6. Save/Load Fixes: More fixes implemented here to improve the quality of our Save/Load for scene layouts and content. Black Skull Studios served as a prime test case for us.
7. Black Skull Studios Scenes Included: Come see what these guys have done with Visual3D, using only the Toolset alone (codeless scene layouts and lighting).
8. Terrain Toolset Maturing: This toolset is still not usable, but in this version you can witness this toolset taking shape.
9. Hiccup Detection and Remedy: Now if your GPU falls behind your GPU (for high content graphical scenes), Visual3D will auto-detect this and rectify the situation by slowing down FPS to make the CPU and GPU synchronize. This eliminates the annoying hiccups and latencies that can occur when the GPU falls behind.
10. Enhanced Collada Support! Are you having trouble with OGRE formats? Give COLLADA a try. We are offering first class support for this model format, and the Model/Material Editors allow you to do corrections directly inside the toolset.
11. More... We are surely forgetting to mention some things, and may add to this later on.

What's New in Beta 2.3:
Lost Isle LandCover and New Terrain system
- Come see 1000's of plants on the island at once, rendered efficiently with advanced automated use of impostors.
- Come see the first view of our GIS2 terrain system which will obsolete the existing terrain systems.

Configurable Landcover:
- Geometry plants automatically placed around camera based on number of parameters declared in XML file (radius, density, scale etc);
- Billboard plants, auto-generated billboard image from real 3D model (fully customizable) from various orientations;
- Billboard plants are synchronized in orientation with 3D model for seamless LOD transitions;
- Fully asynchronous placement of plants;
- Effective frustrum culling for plants allows to remove invisible plants out of rendering queue;
- Normal map is generated for billboard plants (taking 3D model for source normals), allowing dynamic sunlight and ambient+diffuse lighting;
- Geometry plans can cast and receive shadows;
- Plants can be easily animated with sine-wave pattern, applied to entire plant or only it's given part;
- Fade In/Out effects between geometry/billboard LODs and fade-out at far distances; slowly fade in plants which are just appeared during camera movement;
- Fade effects between billboard "orientations" instead of immediate rotation;
- Landcover also can be procedurally generated with user-specified generator function;
- Landcover can be also defined by one (or more) images of various formats, including JPG/PNG/BMP/TGA/DDS and others;
- Landcover can be defined in XML file and tweaked at runtime with large number of customizations (including animation parameters and sprite LOD settings);

Iron-Python Basic Scripting - Preview:
- ScriptedCTF Scene: Capture The Flag using scripted logic described in a script file "ctftasks.py" (python) and "CTFTasks.cs" (C#).
- Console with the built-in interpreter and commands (use "`" key to open and type "help" for available commands)
- Can change code of tasks in run-time through the console using the following commands to reload; ReloadTasks(), ReloadTask("TaskName"). (python only)

More information about this releases advances will be added as it becomes available.