home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Software of the Month Club 1998 June
/
Software of the Month Club 1998 June.iso
/
pc
/
dos
/
sri
/
dtp
/
moray
/
whatsnew.txt
< prev
Wrap
Text File
|
1998-04-15
|
11KB
|
250 lines
Copyright (c) 1992-1997 SoftTronics
Lutz und Kretzschmar GbR, Munich, Germany
V2.5b Maintenance Release Changes
---------------------------------
Improvements:
· Improved redrawing during mouse transformations. Objects no longer
'disappear' if multiple lines of the object occupy the same pixels.
This can cause 'pixel dirt' to appear if the object is textured or
bounded. If you prefer the old system, set UseBetterLineDraw in the INI
to 'No'.
Bugfixes:
· Completely deleting a scene (by NEW or LOAD) would crash if there were
reference objects in the undo buffer. Fixed.
· The settings of the default fontsize in the Object Browser was not being
taken from the INI. Fixed.
· The visibility level of reference objects was not taken into account.
Reference Objects always used the level of the objects that were being
referenced. They now have an independant level.
· The export of some objects that were subobjects of referenced objects
were being exported twice. Fixed.
· Referenced sweeps, CSGs and triangle meshes were being exported twice.
· Heightfield objects using upside down TGA files were displaying incorrect
wireframes. Fixed.
· Increased the stack size to 63K. When nesting groups more than 40
levels the old 32K stack would overflow. Also decreased the stack usage
during loading.
V2.5a Maintenance Release Changes
---------------------------------
Bugfixes:
· The SETUP program and Moray itself would behave erroneously when the space
behind the SearchX keywords in the [FILEOPEN] section were missing.
· The bevel width parameter of translational sweep was incorrectly set to
0.1 by default for new translational sweep objects and for ones that
were read in from existing MDL files. Pressing SHIFT during loading will
set the Bevel Width of *ALL* translational sweeps to 0.
· The graphics library had problems with graphics modes where the number of
bytes per line was not equal to the number of pixels per line. Fixed.
· Added progress meter for loading textures.
· Added code to check that filenames are in the search paths and offer to
add a path to the search paths if not.
· Added DOSShellCommand variable to [CONFIG] section of INI. This command
is executed when you click on DOS-Shell.
· Added a macro %i|file| to the user commands. All space-separated strings
following this are written (one per line) to the file indicated, and the
command invoked is truncated at the %i. If the i is a capital I,
leading and trailing "'s are removed from parameters.
· Added a macro %t to the user commands. It is replaced by 0 if POV-Ray is
the active raytracer and 1 if Polyray is the active raytracer.
· Fixed the bug that made UDO objects forget their transformations when
saved and loaded.
· Allowed all objects and textures to be scaled by a negative number.
· Disallowed zero or negative numbers to be entered as the grid snap
values.
V2.5 Additions and Changes
--------------------------
· Added support for the Superellipsoid primitive.
· Added support to the light sources for interacting with the atmosphere.
· Added support for focal blur functions of the cameras.
· Added sturm keyword to torus and blob objects.
· Added support for the fade_distance, fade_power and shadowless parameters
of lights for POV-Ray 3.0. Polyray supports only the shadowless keyword.
· Added support for the POV-Ray 3.0 atmosphere, fog and background features.
Use Alt-A or click on SETTINGS in the main menu to get to the screen where
these are defined. F9 is implemented in this screen, since you will
probably be wanting to do many test renders<g>.
· Added support for Mosaic previewing for POV-Ray 3.0 on Options menu.
· Added support for radiosity. You need to enable it from the Options
menu (Alt-O). The radiosity settings are set in the Settings
screen (Alt-A).
· Added support for aspect ratios other than 1.3333. The actual area that
will be rendered is shown in the 3D view with two white lines. You
specify the aspect ratio of the camera in its edit menu. Note that you
will still want to change the resolution in the OPTIONS dialog, but you
can make Moray automatically calculate the vertical resolution of the image
according to the selected camera.
Note: The graphical display of the camera frustrum isn't entirely
accurate, it is only an approximation.
· Added support for the hollow keyword, so that fog will appear when camera
is inside an object.
· Added support for displaying a TGA image as a 16-color grayscale backdrop
in the views. In the 2D Views they can be a fixed size or scaled. In the
3D view they always fill the entire viewport.
· Removed POV-Ray 2.2 support and added POV-Ray 3.0 support in the OPTIONS
Dialog.
· Added support for bevelling translational Sweeps. Only flat bevels. If the
bevels self-intersect, they will not render correctly. The bevels are
displayed in the sweep editor, so that you can see whether they do self-
intersect. Bevels are added to the outside of the sweeps and are
displayed in the sweep editor.
· Changed the Sweeps to output POV-Ray 3.0 primitives (unless bevelled).
· Added support for disabling the smoothing of Sweep output. If bevelling is
enabled, white lines that connect the actual sweep and the bevel edge
indicate that this edge will not be smoothed. The green edges will be
smoothed. Use either the Smooth angle, or the divisions to get rid of
white edges.
· Added a REVERSE button to the Sweep Editor to reverse the order of the
control points of the sweep. This may be needed when importing DAT files.
If the bevels point inwards instead of outwards, use this button. If the
highlights of a sweep look incorrect, try this button.
· Changed all splines that are exported as non-smooth raw triangles to use
the new mesh primitive. Any meshes that include smooth triangles cannot
use the mesh primitive.
· Allowed light colors to be outside 0.0 - 1.0 range to allow for darkons
and overexposure.
· Added a Color Editor for setting the color of a light. Click on the
button displaying the light color to activate.
· Changed the way that the User Command Buttons in the Files menu are
labelled. They now get their labels from the INI file, not the MNU file.
· Added two macros to the User menu buttons. %s prompts for a string and
passes it to the program being called, %c prompts for a Yes/No answer
and passes a parameter accordingly to the program. See MORAY.INI for
an example.
· Added the TTF2UDO converter by Thomas Baier, which creates UDO/INC files
from a string and a truetype filename.
· Allowed the Browser screen to be dragged with the mouse. Clicking in
a free area causes the display to follow the mouse.
· Allowed the Browser to store the zoom state and the currently active font
in the INI. On restart the same values are used for the initial display.
· Added code that allowed UDO objects to inform Moray that the object has
a valid texture in the INC file. This object will therefore not trigger
the warning 'Object has no texture' when exporting. Also added code that
allows Moray to ignore extra sections in the UDO file format, in light
of coming extensions (polygons, etc).
· Added code that allows UDO objects to have transformations in the UDO
file.
· Added a proxy view for bumpmaps, if the pigments do not cause a proxy
to be generated. For example a bumpmapped imagemap will only show the
imagemap proxy, not the bumpmap proxy. A solid pigmented bumpmap will
show the bumpmap proxy.
· Added a proxy view for material maps. If using material maps, no proxies
are shown for the sub-textures.
· Added support for hiding all texture proxies. The switch is in the
Options dialog.
· Added status display when deleting a texture (or unused textures). When
this takes a bit of time with large scenes, at least you get feedback
that something is happening.
· Added a DEPENDENCIES button to the FILES menu. This button searches all
scene elements for filenames (imagemaps, bumpmaps, heightfields, UDO's and
raw triangle meshes) and displays them in a list. You can then click on
MAKE BATCH FILE and a file called COPYMDL.BAT will be created in the
directory where MORAY.EXE resides. The batch file copies all the files
to a target you specify as an argument to the batch file. This makes it
relatively easy to share a scene file and to make sure you send everything
to the recipient. A switch button lets you create a structured copy that
includes subdirectories.
Bugfixes:
· Fixed the bug that was causing the button showing the light color to not
be updated and enabled after a render.
· Improved the display of the render region. It is now drawn together with
the render frame in the 3D view, i.e. before all objects are drawn. Also
made it a bit darker.
· Copying UDO objects was leading to memory leaks. Fixed.
· Finally fixed the bug that was causing the first keypress to be swallowed
when starting to type before the File Selector was open.
· Finally fixed the bug that was sporadically causing a out-of-range coord
error when creating a new object. It would also cause all sorts of weird
lines to be drawn in the 3D view immediately before redrawing it correctly.
· Fixed a bug where merging MDL files with reference objects more than
once caused name conflicts and incorrect reference links.
· Fixed a bug in reference objects where the objects they were referencing
were not exported before being used. This only happened if they themselves
contained reference objects. Clear as mud, I know, but all objects
are now exported before they are used.
Known Bugs
----------
· Deleting a spotlight does not delete the associated spot camera. Workaround
is to delete the camera by hand.
· Deleting a CSG object that contains reference objects does not clear
the reference count of the referenced object, so this object cannot
be deleted. Workaround is to use the Clear Undo Buffer command in the
Options Submenu.