Development Log

What's new:

• DirectX 11 render is almost ready (tessellation feature still needs to be implemented).
• Shader Model 5.0 is supported now, i.e. the following six types of shaders are available: vertex, hull, domain, geometry, pixel, compute.
• Switch to August 2009 DirectX SDK (don't forget to update your DirectX installation).
• HDR, glow and SSAO are implemented via DirectCompute in DirectX 11.
• Improved performance of DirectX 10 render.
• Textures can be binded to any type of shaders now.
• Renamed d3d10_render_use_*_level_1 console variables to d3d10_render_use_*_level_101.
• Increased maximal shadow map dimension to 8192 in the editor.
• Added cage feature to AmbientMapper (works similar to the NormalMapper one).
• Fixed ambient occlusion bug with enabled impostors.
• Improved SSAO that takes into account normal map data and provides better quality and reasonable performance (requires re-adjusting parameters).
• GUI rendering speedup.
• Updated HDR post-processes (refactoring, improved performance).
• Added HDR shaft flare effect.
• Detail textures can use 1st or 2nd UV channels for all meshes.
• Plugins for Maya 10.0 (2009).
• Fixed bug with physique modifier in 3dsMax skinned mesh export plugin.
• ObjectGUI without background isn't blurred by the DoF filter.
• Warm start of physical joints.
• Improved freezing of physical objects with joints.
• Added "softness" joint parameter to be used along with "restitution" for fine tuning (use with care, it can affect joint stability).
• Reduced memory consumption by physical contacts data.
• Collision detection speedup.
• Fixed bug with referencing to deleted objects in UnigineScript.
• Garbage collection for objects of extern C++ classes in UnigineScript, use class_manage(obj) function in scripts to register an object for automatic memory management, or use additional arguments of setExternClassObject() or Variable constructor; refer to the documentation for more details.
• Added functional constructors (Unigine::ExternClass::addConstructor() with two arguments) and destructors (Unigine::MakeExternClassDestructor()) of external classes to be exported in UnigineScript via C++ API.
• Faster interconnection between C++ API and scripts.
• Added integration sample for RakNet high-level networking library (source/samples/Network), see "Programming / Application Samples / Network Sample" section of the manual.
• Added network chat sample (data/demos/chat).
• Updated C++ API documentation.
• Completed documentation on UnigineScript library.

By the way, it seems that mesh skinning via compute shaders is faster than stream out under DirectX 11.

Improved SSAO in action:

HDR shaft flare post-effect:

PS: Massive reinforcements of our team has arrived: Pavel Kurinnoy (tools developer), Evgeniy Yundin (QA engineer) and Alexey Maslennikov (sales manager).