Les concepteurs d'Unigine nous dévoilent les nouvelles caractéristiques du moteur pour 2012, comme par exemple le support intégral de Windows 8.



Voici le changelog :



2012-07-20 | Full Support for Windows 8

Render:

Added Overlap and Overlay modes for detail materials into mesh_terrain_base material. Now caves, cliffs and other meshes can have the same detail texturing as a terrain does.

Improved support of geometry shaders on Mac OS X. Now wireframe mode and bokeh DOF are supported on this platform.

Added SHADER_LANGUAGE definition to define a version of OpenGL and OpenGL ES shaders.

Engine profiler and engine messages are now always rendered on top.

Fixed incorrect rendering of static reflections for water.

WorldOccluderTerrain now properly works with reflections (for example, on the water).

Increased the number of HDR cross flares up to 32 (beware, high number of flares can cause a FPS drop on low-performance hardware).

Fixed an issue normal map orientation for one of the projection faces for mesh_triplanar_base material.

Fixed an issue with triplanar projection for mesh_triplanar_base and terrain_base materials.

Added an option to change normals rendering mode for mesh_overlap_base material (States -> Substitute option). Normal maps of an underlying and overlapping material are either combined together (by default), or only the overlapping material normals are used.

Added support of two background cube map textures for sky_base material.

Mobile Platforms:

Added Retina display support for iPhone 4 and 4S.

The loading time of Android applications with a large number of files in assets folder is dramatically improved.

On Android, custom project data can be stored into a folder on a SD card (specified via project_name start-up option).

On Android, configuration file (unigine.cfg) can now be stored under assets folder.

Lifted a limitation on screen resolution for Android applications. Now you can set any screen width and height, no matter what the physical screen resolution is.

Improved exception handling and RTTI support on Android.

Eliminated an issue with random crashes on Android.

Added d3d119_render_use_rgba8 console command to use RGBA8 format (instead of R5G6B5) for all color buffers. It is applicable for OpenGLES and DirectX 11 renderer of DirectX 9 feature level. This option increases rendering speed, decreases memory usage (up to 2 times lower) at the cost of small quality degradation (artifacts are possible when rendering transparent objects). It is enabled by default.

Status bar on iOS devices is now automatically hidden.

Added detection of Qualcomm Adreno 320 graphics chips.

UnigineScript:

Scrips are now faster by 10-20 per cent. This speed-up is especially noticeable on platforms with small cache memory (mobile tablets and devices).

Improved performance of all callbacks: world, physics and GUI callbacks, as well as calls from Flash (ActionScript) to script became much more robust.

Fixed a file size bug by saving and restoring the world state multiple times when the editor is loaded.

Added a function to clear a loaded GUI dictionary with a localized interface (engine.gui.clearDictionary()).

No lags when pausing/resuming playback of Theora video files.

Fixed a crash on deletion of ObjectBillboards and WorldCluster nodes.

Any of high-level Unigine::Widgets can be used to create an interface for editor plugins. There is no need to explicitly include them via #include directive.

Fixed a bug with non-updated messages in Unigine::Widgets Dialog widgets.

Small speed-up of all GUI widgets, faster rendering of fonts.

Huge memory deallocation speed increase. On Unigine stress test samples with heaps of objects, world shutdown is now 15x faster.

Flash:

Increased performance of WidgetFlash: for example, interfaces in samples/widgets/flash_* now work 2 times faster.

The number of draw calls for Flash is significantly decreased. Polygons and lines are batched when rendered. A texture atlas is automatically created for all textures smaller than 256x256 pixels in size (only non-tiled textures) to increase the rendering speed.

Fixed a bug with incorrect scaling of rich text set via WidgetFlash::setFontScale().

Added functions to get information on the number of triangles, lines and draw calls required to render a Flash movie widget: getNumTriangles(), getNumDips(), getNumLines().

Other:

Improved detection of the number of available CPU cores for all Linux-based platform (Android included). This allows for more efficient load balancing.

Added a new Interface color chart into the performance profiler that shows statistics on rendering time of GUI.

Start-up option project is renamed into project_name.

Added a new sample with mesh_triplanar_base material: samples/materials/triplanar_01.

Fixed a minor bug with incorrect parsing of hspacing and vspacing arguments for text in UI files.

Fixed a bug with crashes on multiple successive calls for engine initialization/shutdown.

Added an additional implementation of Engine::init() function with a custom application path argument. Pass NULL value to skip this argument.

Documentation:

Added an article on custom plugins for Editor (Tools -> Unigine Editor -> Custom Editor Plugins).

Added information on LUT shading material: LUT generation tool (Tools -> Tools Panel -> LUT Generation Tool) and mesh_lut_base (Materials -> mesh_lut_base).

Windows 8: Full Support for Metro-Style Apps

We are glad to announce that Unigine engine is now fully compatible with Windows 8 Release Candidate SDK. To add a new Metro-style look and feel to your Unigine-powered application, all you need is to launch it. It just works.


Moreover, you can get support of upcoming tablets and other ARM-based mobile devices with Windows RT at zero development cost. Unigine already provides it out of the box - you simply take advantage.



Find the following features supported:



Added full compatibility with Windows 8 Release Candidate SDK.

Added support of Windows RT for ARM devices.

Windows RT comes with NEON optimization support on the ARM platform.

Added D3D11AppTablet class to initialize the video mode in Metro-style applications for Windows RT.

Added support of DirectX 11 of feature level DirectX 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 to cover the whole range of next-generation Windows RT mobile devices.

It is possible to set DirectX 11 renderer of DirectX 9 feature level (direct3d119) via video_app start-up option. With this feature, you can check how the application will be rendered on upcoming ARM mobile devices with Windows RT.

Added detection of available CPUs for Windows 8, as well as a processor name.

Added remote debugging support: connect to Windows RT application via Telnet application on port 8888 (telnet:888.

Added support of FileClient plugin for faster development iterations on Windows RT.