And another update. Since 1.35 is still in the works (which in my opinion is a good sign, as that what Julio posted about it looks just fantastic) I get the time to put some more stuff/features into my playground.
Some of the very recent additions are a
totally redesigned user interface which now uses just icons instead of text buttons. It does not only look much better, but also wastes much less space and uses some sub-menus for better usability.
Next feature that was recently included are
special materials. In addition to normal materials you can now also add pre-defined special materials to the material manager which can then be applied to the bodies. See
this screenshot for how adding them looks like. Right now there is only a conveyor-material (which btw. was inspired what walaber did, so thanks to that go again for him. Seems he is a well of inspiration, whereas I loose all my inspiration as soon as I startup my PC
), but others will follow.
Third new feature :
stencil shadow volumes. I wanted to have them in for a long time but never had the time to do so. Implementing them was rather easy due to the fact that I already implemented them several times. But they're not working 100% and need some tweaking. There is also the problem with shadow volumes and non-closed meshes, so non-closed meshes loaded e.g. from 3DS files can generate errors, but that's something you can't easily fix with stencil shadow volumes, so users will need to take care of that when making meshes for the playground. This feature also eats up a lot of performance, so I'm still undecided on wether I should leave it in the final release or not.
And since people prefer screenshots and moving pictures, you'll get them :
(clicky for bigger view)
You can see the new shadows in here and moreover the totally new user interface on the right side. It includes all options of the "old" one and is very easy to use. At first I didn't think it was a good idea to change the UI to a pure-icon-UI, but after finishing the new UI that thought disappeared.
And since a conveyor belt is very boring on a screenshot, here is again a nice
Video (~4 MBytes, WMV, ~60 secs) of it for you to watch. You'll see all the new features in action on this one.
Oh and one last "rant" about Newton : I'm really disgusted about how easy it was to implement a conveyor belt. I went downstairs, made me a cup of coffee and thought "now you'll have some thinking and work to do on implementing a callback for the conveyor belt", but nada...it was just two lines of code and the conveyor belt worked...