1. Support for ambient occlusion maps.
2. A fix for the incorrect handling of normals on all geometries. The optimizer usually fixed this bug so it probably was not noticed very often.
3. A new option flag on the reader. "StrictTransparency"
// Process transparent and transparency settings according to a strict interpretation of the spec
// See https://collada.org/public_forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1210
otherwise
// Jump through various hoops to accomodate the multiplicity of different ways
// that various people have interpreted the specification
4. Handling of texures in the transparent channel. This is allowed provided that they are the same texture that is specified in the diffuse channel. Accomodating a different texture would require use of programmable pipeline functionality which I have tried to avoid.
5. Handling of <bind_vertex_input> elements.
""
A Collada camera will be added to the scenegraph as osg::CameraView. This allows the user to create a set of predefined camera viewpoints. I also added a new MatrixManipulator to osgGA called CameraViewSwitchManipulator and added usage of this to the osgviewer example. This manipulator allows switching between the predefined camera viewpoints. The current design limition I ran into is that a MatrixManipulator only manipulates the ViewMatrix, but for this particular manipulator I also want to update the projectionMatrix of the camera when switching to a new viewpoint. This is not implemented because I don't know what would be the best way to design it. Any ideas?
Furthermore Collada also supports orthographic camera's, where an osg::CameraView only supports a perspective camera. Would it be useful to create a CameraView with customizable optics for this?"
osgDB/FileUtils.cpp:
Needed this extra code to allow a true case-insensitive search. This is because the HL2 map and model files are often sloppy with case. For example, the file might look for materials/models/alyx/alyx_sheet.vtf, but the file is actually in materials/Models/Alyx/alyx_sheet.vtf. In case-insensitive mode, the new code recursively disassembles the path and checks each path element without regard to case. In case-sensitive mode, the code behaves exactly as it used to. The new code is also mostly skipped on Windows because of the case-insensitive file system. Previously, I did all of this with custom search code in the .bsp plugin, but this allows the user to tailor the search using OSGFILEPATH. There are some instructions in the plugins' README files about this.
osgPlugins/mdl:
This is a new plug-in for Half-Life 2 models (as opposed to maps). This allows you to load Source models individually, as well as allowing the .bsp plugin to load models (props) that are embedded into maps. Mdl files can contain simple object (crates, barrels, bottles), as well as fully articulated characters with skeletal animations. Currently, it can load the simple objects. It can also load the characters, but it can't load the skeletons or animations.
osgPlugins/bsp:
This contains all of the changes needed to load props along with the basic map geometry. There are also
several bugs fixed.
osgPlugins/vtf:
This is the loader for Valve's texture format. Previously, we had agreed to put this in with the bsp plugin, but I didn't think of the .mdl plugin at that time. It's conceivable that a user might want to load models individually (not as part of a map), so the vtf reader does have to be separate. I also fixed a rather significant bug.
I tested all of this code on RHEL 5.2 (32-bit), and Fedora 9 (64-bit). I'll be testing on Windows soon.
I also attached a simple .mdl file, along with it's associated files and textures. Just extract the tarball into it's own directory, set your OSGFILEPATH to point at that directory, and load the model like this:
osgviewer models/props_junk/gascan001a.mdl"
