Released updated versions of Unigine benchmarks with support of OpenGL 4.0 (including hardware tessellation) and stereo 3D technology (including 3D Vision): Heaven 2.1, Tropics 1.3 and Sanctuary 2.3.
2010-05-04
5 years since the first commercial release of Unigine
The first commercial version of Unigine engine was released five years ago, on May 4, 2005.
With the release number 0.3, it had codebase size of approximately 10% relative to the current one.
At that time, there used to be 5 people on board.
2010-03-23
Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.0
Updated version of Unigine Heaven DirectX 11 benchmark is now publicly available.
Main changes are: added more content, improved engine, introduced "moderate" and "extreme" tessellation modes, added Linux version (32/64 bit).
2010-02-22
Unigine booth at GDC SF 2010
We gladly invite you to come visit our booth #1344 at Game Developers Conference, San Francisco, 2010.
There you will be presented the recent version of Unigine Engine and the Heaven Benchmark 2.0 along with a lot of featured Unigine-based content.
Feel free to contact us for an appointment.
Physical force fields, particles improvements and Softimage plugin
Physics:
New PhysicalForce, PhysicalWind and PhysicalWater objects (simulation of viscous medium, buoyancy and resistance forces).
Fluid buoyancy for all physical shapes.
Added a set of samples with physical force fields and a rope sample.
JointPin can attach cloth to ragdolls.
Physics visualizers are now shown only with the editor loaded.
Particle systems are now affected by force fields.
Fixed velocity calculation for ragdolls transformed with setVelocityTransform() function.
Added 'world_show_physicals' console variable.
Particles:
New Chain type of particles for shift emitters to generate a seamless flow.
Particles reset emitter parameters on disabling/enabling of the node.
Some renaming in world/node files: 'stretch' -> 'length_stretch' and 'point_force' -> 'force' (run upgrade.py script to convert your data). This affected ObjectParticles API as well.
Removed 'emitter_velocity' and 'emitter_scale' parameters from the particle systems; added slightly different 'emitter_direction' and 'emitter_spread' instead.
Chain particle systems affected by force fields:
Other stuff:
Export plugins for Softimage 2010 (static geometry, skinned mesh animation).
Fixed AppWindow in Linux: it provides the same keycodes regardless of the current key layout.
Fixed node type filter in UnigineEditor.
Refactored tessellation shaders; there is some performance improvement.
Added 'post_filter_rgb2yuv' post-process filter that is useful for TV broadcasting.
Improved Unigine::Image C++ API: added more functions for image processing.
Added WidgetSpriteShader object, which can be used with a custom shader for post-process material.
'-Os' replaced by '-O3' in GCC flags, which gave a 20% speed boost in Linux.
Fixed water artifacts produced by overlaping waves.
Line intersection functions for all physics shapes.
Fixed detail textures with SRGB enabled.
Added access to image pixels via C++ API.
Vertex cache optimization is now optional (see export plugins settings).
Optional axes flip on import in ResourceEditor.
Added "frame based" flag for every bone of the ragdoll to mix physics-driven and skinned mesh animations.
New Body::setVelocityTransform() function that calculates linear and angular velocities based on the body transformation.
Fixed a rare startup crash caused by multi-threading access to archived files.
More verbose XML parser.
Fixed saving of materials into nodes.
'restitution' and 'softness' joint parameters splitted into linear_restitution / angular_restitution and linear_softness / angular_softness (don't forget to run the upgrade script).
Optimized tessellation shaders for DirectX 11.
Added documentation on sky ("Principles of Operation / Objects / Sky" section of the manual).
Here are some technical details on how tessellation works under the hood:
Release of the Heaven benchmark attracted a lot of attention in the Net (our webserver has had a near-death experience several times) since there are no DX11 benchmarks so far: news item on Tom's Hardware.
Wow, we made it.
Support of OpenGL 3.2 (MSAA on scattering and SSAO; support of signed textures for normal maps).
Added new mesh_tessellation_paint_base base material.
Granted access to ObjectMeshSkinned via C++ API.
Updated C++ API documentation.
Fixed bug with parsing '#' symbol inside define-disabled blocks in scripts.
Memory allocator is more verbose now.
Decreased CPU cache miss count.
Replacing the 'inline' statement by '__forceinline' provided a huge performance speedup under Windows.
Refactoring of XML parser.
Less system memory consumption on DirectX 9.
Empty maps can be declared as (:) in UnigineScript.
Refactored KeyLine system, please refer to the documentation for more info.
Fixed crash of import plugins on surfaces with zero vertex count.
Fixed batch changing of light options in UnigineEditor.
Improved seams removing algorithm for ResourceEditor.
ObjectGrass intersects with the parent object with the use of intersection mask.
Updated documentation on lighting ("Principles of Operation / Lighting and Shadows" section of the manual).
Here is a preliminary screenshot from the upcoming DirectX 11 benchmark based on Unigine:
The demonstration of the benchmark will be held on the major forthcoming event, stay tuned for more news.
