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nCine v2020.05 Release Notes

Release Date: 2020-05-18 // about 3 years ago

Previous changes from v2019.10

  • 🚀 This is the second nCine release.

    Manifest

    • nCine-2019.10-Win64-VS2019.exe (md5: 8e505ffe0ec256688e85e00dbbe7ec17)
    • nCine-2019.10-Win64-VS2019.zip (md5: 63d93c1cdba532c002fd59b0094e1dd2)
    • nCine-2019.10-Win64-VS2017.exe (md5: 99d9fc5b22a51286fe76bf8634316390)
    • nCine-2019.10-Win64-VS2017.zip (md5: 1cff45df92503c773ca2dc1d2f31dc78)
    • nCine-2019.10-Darwin.dmg (md5: 1554b5a3d906d7c3bd62f50c53eb2f85)

    🔄 Changelog

    💥 Breaking Changes

    • The Font constructor has now inverted parameters: fntFilename as first and texFilename as second
      • The reason for that is the new single parameter constructor
    • SceneNode::parentNode() getter has been renamed to just parent(), to be consistent with the new setParent() setter
    • The xResolution and yResolution fields of the AppConfiguration class have been replaced by a single 2D resolution vector
      • The setResolution() helper method has been removed as it is now possible to call resolution.set()
      • In Lua x_res and y_res have been replaced by the resolution 2D vector
    • The old non ImGui debug overlay has been deleted. If you need the debug overlay you also need to enable the ImGui integration
      • As part of this change the fontTexFilename and fontFntFilename strings in the AppConfiguration class have been deleted
    • The withProfilerGraphs and withInfoText flags in the AppConfiguration class has been unified into a single withDebugOverlay flag
      • You have to explicitely set the new flag to true to enable the debug overlay even when your application is compiled in debug mode
    • Many nctl::String::copy() methods have been turned into assign() methods in order to be more consistent with STL
    • 🚚 The Timer::now() method has been removed, refer to the new TimeStamp class

    🆕 New Features

    • 🍱 Emscripten is now supported as a target platform, meaning you can now use the nCine for web games! 🕸
    • The user can now query the available fullscreen video modes on PC and choose one
      • The IGfxDevice interface has been enriched with methods to query the current video mode, the list of available ones and to set a new mode
    • A new deferShaderQueries flag has been added to the AppConfiguration classes
      • When it is set to true all the shader error checks and introspection queries are deferred upon the first use of the shader, if it is ever used.
      • The option allows for decreased starting time at the expense of possible stutters when the shader is first used in a frame
    • 🆕 New methods have been added to the audio classes to query their state
      • They were used in the new Audio Players section of the ImGui debug overlay interface
    • If you use the nCine compiled as a static library you have now access to more functionalities in the OpenGL classes
      • You can now create PBOs and TBOs.
      • You can now use GL_SAMPLER_1D and GL_SAMPLER_3D types in shaders
      • A new GLCullFace class has been added to track OpenGL face culling state
    • 📜 The Font class now relies on FntParser class to extract all the data from a FNT file
      • More checks are now performed to ensure the text can be properly rendered
      • More glyph channel configurations are now supported and rendered correctly
      • The Font class can be constructed with a single parameter: the FNT file. The texture will be loaded according to the file specified in the first page tag.
    • 👍 When you compile the engine you can now choose to disable the support for various dependency libraries and features
      • You can disable threads support, Lua bindings, Png or WebP image loading, Ogg Vorbis sound loading or audio altogether

    👌 Improvements

    • The version of the integrated Tracy has gone from v0.4.1 to v0.5
      • It is now easier to use Tracy in custom nCine projects, including on Android
      • Threads can be named so that they can be tracked in the Tracy profiler
      • You can now also retrieve current thread priority or set a new one
      • All log entries are written out as coloured Tracy messages
      • Threads id are invalidated on join and cancel so that they can be reused
    • 🚀 The version of the integrated ImGui has gone from v1.70 to v1.73
    • ⚡️ The GameController mapping database has been updated from the one included in SDL 2.0.9 to the one in SDL 2.0.10
    • 👀 The SceneNode classes has seen the addition of long awaited helper methods in the shape of setParent(), alpha() and absAlpha()
      • The first one makes it easy and intuitive to set a node parent without going the opposite way by calling parent->addChildNode(this)
      • The alpha related methods should make it easier to query for a node alpha value
      • There are also new Lua methods for scene nodes: set_parent(), get_alpha() and set_alpha()
    • The new TimeStamp class can be used to collect timestamps at the full precision of the internal clock
      • The Time class has been enhanced with stop() and totalTime() methods to aggregate multiple time spans
      • Most methods of the TimeStamp class are also accessible through the Lua API
    • It is now possible to assign() a certain numbers of characters from a C string to an nctl::String object
    • You can now enable the ImGui debug overlay even when the scenegraph is disabled
      • In this case be sure to track OpenGL states using GLBlending, GLDepthTest and the new GLCullFace class
    • The Font class has a new query method, numKernings(), to retrieve the number of kerning pairs in a font (it is called num_kernings() in Lua)
    • You can access the array of animations in an AnimatedSprite and the array of rectangles in a RectAnimation
    • 🏁 On Windows the executables use the Windows subsystem instead of the console one
      • They will also expose version properties thanks to the VERSIONINFO file
    • ⚡️ The Android Gradle plugin version has been updated from 3.4.0 to 3.4.1 and Android build tools from 28.0.3 to 29.0.2
      • The changes have been reflected in the template project as well

    🛠 Fixes

    • 🍱 Compiler warnings related with nctl::UniquePtr wrapping forward declared classes have been fixed. They could have sometimes led to incorrect object deletions and possible leaks. 😨
    • 🍱 The OpenAL implementation has been rewritten and many bugs that were lurking in the code should have been squashed 🐛
    • Some changes dictated by the layout of the new ncTemplate project
      • The CMake scripts now expect a nCine-data/icons/icon.ico file instead of the old nCine.ico
      • Installers are now built with the CPACK_PACKAGE_VENDOR and CPACK_PACKAGE_HOMEPAGE_URL variables correctly set
    • The returned value for GL_MAX_UNIFORM_BLOCK_SIZE is now clamped to 64kB because some OpenGL drivers might return very big numbers

    Libraries

    🚀 This release is packaged together with:

    The Android libraries have been compiled with NDK r20 for armeabi-v7a, arm64-v8a and x86_64.