OSG News (most significant items from ChangeLog) ================================================ July 2002 - OpenSceneGraph-0.9.0.tar.gz >>> OpenSceneGraph goes beta - Multitexturing, Occlusion Culling, Particles and much more added! This release marks the beginning of the beta phase of the OpenSceneGraph development, which means that all the major core features are now in the scene graph, and 1.0 is not far away. Its performance, features and portability already compares very favorably to other scene graphs, both comerical and open source. Multi-texturing support added to osg::StateSet, osg::Geometry, osg::State and txp loader. New osg::Geometry classes which supersedes the old Performer style osg::GeoSet, support multi-texturing, and uses sharable osg::Arrays which use std::vector<> for data storage and manipulation. Shadow volume occlusion culling adding to the core OSG, developed as a collobaration between Mike Connell and Robert Osfield. Our implementation uses convex planer occluders, with support for holes to allow larger and more effective occluders to be used. The approach is software based so it 100% portable, and by culling during the cull traversal both CPU and GPU loads are significantly reduced, making it an extremely powerful feature for large scale urban and indoor visulisation. osgParticle developed by Marco Jez adds support for a range of particle effects. osgGA (Gui Abstraction) library written by Neil Salter adds classes for adapting different GUI toolkits to work with a standard set of manipulators for modifying the scene, such as camera and state manipulators. Support has been added to the plugin architecture to facilitate the development of NodeKits - add on libraries which can used directly in your code, or loaded indirectly when loading from file. The later allows you to load a .osg file with text or particle effects in them,the plugin architecture automatically loads the required library which supports these features. A range of new demos have been as code examples, and to demonstrate the range of features that OpenSceneGraph delivers: osgoccluder - demonstrates ocllusion culling, and has a mode which allows the users to interactively create their own convex planer occluders. osghud - how to mix head up display with 3d views. osgparticle - shows the new osgParticle node kit in action. osgprerender - pre renders and scene then textures the result onto an animated flag. osgcallback - examples of the full range of callbacks that you can use to add dynamic behaviors to your scene graph. osglight - a simple example of how to set up spot and position lights in the scene. osgclip - illustrates how to add clip planes to you scene. osggeometry - examples of the different ways to set up primitives and vertex/color/normal and texture attributes in the new osg::Geometry class. osgmultitexture - a simple example which adds a spherical reflection map to a whole scene using the second texture unit if one exists. osg::Drawable::PrimtiveFunctor has also been added to allow querrying of primitive data with Drawables subclasses without requiring knowledge of the types of Drawable subclasses that exists. This decoupling makes it a very powerful and flexible utility. 26th April 2002 - OpenSceneGraph-0.8.45.tar.gz >>> Support added for Solaris, texture cube mapping & muliple projections. The OpenSceneGraph now has a new Makefile system which supports all Unix compilation including the new addition to the family - Solaris! OpenSceneGraph welcomes Solaris to the list of supported platforms. This release puts all of the OpenSceneGraph functionality at the fingertips of Sun Microsystem's customers and developers. Solaris users can now have the benefit of a high performance scene graph for visual simulation, virtual reality, scientific visualization, CAD, and architectural walk-throughs. Many thanks to Sun for providing resources for the port. Additional html documentation has been added to the distribution to make it easier to get an understanding of scene graph technology and the project itself and how to make use of it. Support has also been added for OpenGL's texture cube mapping which is ideal for accurate environmental reflections and much more. The scene graph has been extended to allow multiple projection (via the new osg::Projection node) and viewports within one scene graphs, this makes it much easier to set up head up displays, and we have an example to demonstrate how easy it is - osghud. The osgUtil::CullVisitor and osgUtil::SceneView has been revamped removing the dependency on osg::Camera, which is now simply an option for SceneView rather than a requirement. This allows users to set the camera entirely with the scene graph or create their own camera classes and use them with SceneView. The existing osg::Camera has also been simplified as support for setting projection and modelview matrices have been moved out to the cull traversal. Several sets of node callbacks have been added, including a Cull NodeCallback on each Node, ComputeTransformCallback on Transform Nodes, EvaluateLODCallback on LOD nodes, ComputeBillboardCallback on Billboard nodes. These make it my easier to customize the scene graphs behavior at runtime. osg::Image::readPixels() and support for writing .bmp files has been added which has made it easy to add screen capture the any OpenSceneGraph application. This feature is demonstrated in the scene graph viewer which comes with the distribution - just press 'O' to output a screenshot. Finally, include/osg/MemoryManager has been added which overrides new and delete for debug builds. The override new and delete track allocations and deallocations, ensure they are matched, checked for memory under and overruns, and outputs a memleaks.log file on the results of executing your applications. This help track down a number of memory leaks and unmatched new and deletes within the OpenSceneGraph and should make it easier to do with users applications as well. All in all, the OpenSceneGraph is now more portable, easier to customize, cleaner and more robust. Beta release and 1.0 is now not far away! 24th February 2002 - osg-0.8.44.tar.gz >>> Support added for Mac OSX, Cygwin and MinGW, and new TerraPage loader. The major item for this release is the completion of the Mac OSX port, thanks to Phil Atkin and others for making this happen. Also added to support for Cygwin and MinGW builds which gives Windows users a free and robust alternative to the Visual C++, which we have Norman Vine to thank. Funtionality wise there has been a great deal of work behind the scenes putting in place a flexible and extensible framework for handling transform nodes, users can now extend the osg::Transform node through subclassing or via callbacks. This work will underpin future work on moving camera setup into the scene graph, and environmental effects such as cloud layers, ground planes, stars and earth sky implementations which are planned for the next release. Callbacks and virtual methods have also been added to the osg::LOD & osg::Billboard to allow users to customize their behavior. Draw callbacks have also been added to allow customization of osg::Drawables at runtime. The Open Flight .flt loader has undergone a number of improvements including support for instancing and billboards. New TerraPage (.txp) loader and OpenDX writer (.dx) plugins have been added. Support for the clone operation on osg::Object's has been expanded to allow cloneType() - a simple clone an blank object of the same type, and clone(CopyOp&) where CopyOp is a functor which allows users to specify the deep copy vs shallow copying of object data. 2nd January 2002 - osg-0.8.43.tar.gz >>> Support for TrueType text, Stereo out of the box, and much more. Since the last release the OSG has moved to CVS based developments so many users will have seen gradual increments in functionality and changes to the API. Whereas a the leap from 0.8.42 to 0.8.43 is actually quite significant is likely to require code changes as several significant parts of the API have evolved to a more mature state. The most significant new functionality is the addition of the osgText library which provides support for true type font rendering, as textured, polygonal, pixmap, bitmap and 3D fonts. We now have new osg::Matrix implementation which cleans up its interface. Also all angular paramters are now based on radians rather than degrees as before (and as in Performer), this has been done to be more consistent with the basic trignometric functions and standard maths conventions. Scene graph optimization has been added which can boost performance on some database by as much as an order of magnititude, this is particularily noticable in .flt based databases. Display list performance has also been boosted on NVidia based machines thanks to changing the compilation and execution of display list into two seperate operations. App callbacks are now supported on all Nodes, and there now a proper app traversal which can be used to animate the scene. Stereo support has been added into the osgUtil::SceneView which allows quad buffered/anaglyphic stereo to enabled easily for almost all OSG applications without code modifications - simple set environmental variable or pass in appropriate arguments and your app will render in stereo! src/Demos/osgcluster has been added to demonstrate how easy it is to set up a graphics cluster across a standard networked PC's. There have been many minor code changes to fix bugs and address performance bottlenecks or to improve extensibility was, representing a significant step towards API maturity and a beta release which is now not far away. 9th August 2001 - osg-0.8.42.tar.gz >>> New osgWX library for integration of OSG with wxWindows apps. This release sees a relatively minor number of enhancements over 0.8.41, the most significant being the new osgWX library and wxsgv demo written by Ben Discoe. Also from Brede Johansen in this release is the improvements in support for older .flt (Open Flight) files such versions 12 & 13. Previously only version 15.6 files had been tested and developed to. Last but by no means least, several bug fixes related to view frustum culling have been made. 25th July 2001 - osg-0.8.41.tar.gz >>> Support added for multi-pass and multi-stage rendering including Impostors. The key feature developed is a highly flexible framework for multi-pass and multi-stage rendering techniques. Unlike most scene graphs and games engines the OSG has as dynamic framework which automatically configures itself at runtime. Building ontop of the new framework's multi-stage rendering capabilities, support for Impostors (hirachical image caching) has been integrated into the core scene graph library making extremely easy to take advantage of this advanced rendering techinque - normally only seen in research papers. Check out osgimpostor demo to see how easy it is to add osg::Impostor nodes to your own models. Impostors are particularily effective are reducing scene complexity whilest minimizing the visual impact, making it ideal for scenes with large numbers of complex objects such as a city scene, or a dense forest. Taking advantage of the new framework's multi-pass rendering capabilities is osgreflect demo which illustrates how to achieve planar relfections using the stencil buffer and multi-pass rendering. The cool thing about both the osgreflect and osgimpostor demos is that there is no hardwiring to achieve the results, the scene graph stores all the information neccessary to specify the number and type of rendering passes, and the framework handles the rest behind the scenes. This also makes it very easy to add these advanced rendering techinques to your own applications as everything is cleanly encapsulated with osgUtil::SceneView. New loaders have been added to support .lwo (Light Wave), .obj (Alias Wavefront) and .dw (Design Workshop) 3D file formats making it even easier to compose your own worlds from models sourced from the web or your own. osg::Camera has been totally revamped and now supports asymetric and othographics projections in addition to the symetrical perspective projections. And finally, support for texture subloading has been added to osg::Texture and osg::Image. This allows textures to be updated dynamically, and has already been used for mpeg video playback! 19th May 2001 - osg-0.8.40.tar.gz >>> Project lead, Robert Osfield, makes full-time commitment to OSG. This is the first full release since project lead, Robert Osfield, made a move to pursue the OSG's development full-time. This commitment has been made to bring the API rapidly towards maturity, and to provide high quality support and consultancy services. Please contact robert@openscenegraph.com if you have any queries. This release marks a significant step forward in the maturity of the API, with several major changes to the library in the areas of state handling, database support, and portability. To improve the extensibility of the OSG's handling of OpenGL state, new classes have been introduced to replace the previous hardwired state handling classes. The new classes also allow improved state sorting and lazy state updating which boosts both cull traversal and particularly draw traversal performance. To improve the modularity, interopability and conceptual clarity the support classes for database loading have been moved from the core osg library into their own osgDB library. Support for the .osg ASCII native database format and the .rgb reader has moved into its own osgPlugins library to further the cleanliness of the core library. Support has be added for multiple OpenGL context's and hence multi-pipe systems such as sgi's Onyx2, allowing each context to have its own display list and texture objects. The culler and rendering support in osgUtil has also been improved, and significantly speeded up for complex models. Also just in, thanks to Randall Hopper for adding support for FreeBSD :-) 23rd March 2001 - osg-0.8.39.tar.gz >>> Port of OSG to MacOS underway The first steps towards support of MacOS have been taken by Bryan Woods, adding Metrowerks project files and adding support for MacOS into the core scene graph. Work still in progress so assistance welcome to complete the task. Other major developments have been the addition of two new base classes osg::StateAttribute and osg::Drawable which are designed to allow greater extensibility of OpenGL state management and primitives. 17th Feburary 2001 - osg-0.8.38.tar.gz >>> New 3DS loader added The OpenSceneGraph now supports the 3DS file format. This makes available a huge range of potential models. Check out http://www.3dcafe.com or http://www.3drocketfuel.com for some juice. 10th Feburary 2001 - osg_src-0.8-37.tar.gz >>> Texture compression now supported The OpenSceneGraph now provides support for ARB and S3TC texture compression. This allows more textures to be loaded onto graphics card memory, resulting in happier users and a better world in which to live. This release also sees the addition of a simple hang gliding flight sim demo. 25th January 2001 - osg_src-0.8-35.tar.gz >>> Anisotropic texturing now supported and loading of gzip compressed files Anisotropic texturing provides for the next step in quality texturing filtering above tri-linear and is especially effective when viewing texture surfaces at shallow angles. Also added in this release is on-the-fly support for loading gzipped (.osgtgz, .tgz) and zipped (.zip) database files. This features allows users to store whole databases (models and textures) in a single tar ball and unpack them automatically on running the osg. This is ideal for browsing the web. 22nd December 2000 - osg_src-0.8-33.tar.gz >>> Support added for OpenGL vertex arrays, and several key image loaders. Support for OpenGL vertex arrays has been added to improve performance, particularly accelerating PC based graphics. Also added is support gif, jpeg, pic, tga, tiff image formats via dynamic plugins. 8th Decemeber 2000 - osg_src-0.8-32.tar.gz >>> New high resolution, low latency timer class - osg::Timer. Real-time graphics relies upon accurate timers for updating physics simulations and managing constant framerates. The OSG now provides osg::Timer which, when supported, takes advantage of hardware timers. 18th November 2000 - osg_src-0.8-29.tar.gz >>> Support for detail drawing with osg::PolygonOffset. Rendering of polygons which overlay underlying geometry, such as white lines on a runway, can now be achieved utilizing the new osg::PolygonOffset which encapsulates glPolygonOffset to avoid z fighting which otherwise hampers such detailing. 10th November 2000 - osg_src-0.8-28.tar.gz >>> New Open Flight .flt loader! Thanks to Brede Johansen submission of .flt loader, the OSG can now read Open Flight .flt databases. 3rd November 2000 - osg_src-0.8-26.tar.gz >>> Driving and Flight modes have been added to viewers. osgUtil::DriveManipulator and osgUtil::FlightManipulator have been added to allow the scene graph viewer (sgv) and other viewers to support a drive and flying modes. These modes can be accessed in sgv by pressing '2' and '3' respectively ('1' returns to trackball manipulator). Left mouse button accelerates forward, middle stops motion and right deccelerates.