Virtools Dev 3.0.0.80 Patch:
Virtools Software Suite 3.0 Service Pack 2

New Features

• New Shader features:
  • Set Shader BB: Applies a shader to a material.
  • Support for floating point surfaces.
  • Support for multiple render targets.
  • Support for Shader Model 3.0 & DirectX 9.0 C.
  • The complete shader (not just a given function) can now be displayed in assembly (with or without pre-shader compilation).
  • Note: The new rasterizer requires the DirectX 9.0 C (summer or october 2004) runtime!
  • New Shader technical samples in the Virtools Minisite.
    
    
• Interface:
  • New Behavior Graph Replacement Feature: all other behavior graphs with the same name as the one selected will be replaced with the currently selected one.
  • New Shortcut Feature: User-definable color-coding for related parameters and shortcuts.
  • New menu items in the 3D View contextual menu:
    • Show Item in Hierarchy View
    • Show Item in Level View
    • Set/Remove/Restore Initials Conditions
    • Character body parts can be selected using the Alt key modifier.
  • New menu items in Schematic View's contextual menu:
    • Sort By Priority (owner priority + script priority)
    • Activate/Deactivate/Reset Script.
  • New Schematic Keyboard Shortcut
  • "Ctrl+Shift+Double Left Click" opens a combo box with all available RunVSL BBs (like Ctrl+Double Left Click does for every possible BB).
  • "Ctrl+Shift+Right Mouse Button" opens a menu with all available RunVSL BBs.
• New command in Options Menu: "Check for updates at next startup" forces Dev to check the availability of new patches on the Virtools website. (The default value is once a week.)
• New Texture Setup menu commands added:
  • Set diffuse to black.
  • Set diffuse to white.
  • Get diffuse from alpha.
  • Swap with alpha.
  • Get alpha from diffuse.
    
    
• Rendering
  • New texgen parameters for material effects in the Material Setup: UVx (x in 0..7) to specify which texture coordinate set should be used in an effect.
    
    
• FlexLM: Borrowing FlexLM Server Licenses is now enabled. Contact license.request@virtools.com for more information.

Interface Bug Fixes

• "Ctrl+F" shortcut is now available in the CHM documentation even when it is opened using F1 from Virtools Dev.
• "Ctrl+F4" was not allowed as keyboard shortcut for the Action Manager.
• Preferences were restored regardless of whether YES or NO was chosen in the confirmation dialog box.
• Contextual menu in schematic correction: "Move'n'Scroll mode ALT" is now "Move'n'Scroll mode G" (since the "G" keyboard shortcut goes back to Create Graph mode)
• The Minimize, Maximize and Close buttons sometimes disappeared when returning from fullscreen.
• The "P" keyboard shortcut in schematic changes the path of all links connected to a selection from straight link to best path link.
• Sprite3D scale could not be edited in the Setup if the 3D Sprite did not have an assigned material.
• Schematic filter box took too long to close.
• Fixed a Dev crash when exiting after a Setup has been duplicated.
• Fixed a Dev crash that occurred when opening VSL Editor under NT4.
• The richedit in VSL Editor did not support French ascii char typed with the "Alt Gr" key (i.e. equivalent to "ctrl + alt") : e.g. the undo became invalid if '{' was typed.
• If the Preferences/'Constant size on screen' was enabled for 3D Frames, they would loose the parenting information.
• Loading an NMS containing shortcuts with invalid links could produce red links going nowhere.
• Fixed a Dev crash when copying and pasting a graph containing a VSL BB.
• F7 was not compiling VSL scripts or shaders when the VSL/Shader Editor was in fullscreen.
• Fixed a crash in the Hierarchy Manager when pressing the right key on the last item.
• The "show/hide local parameters" command in the Schematic wasn't working properly.
• Fixed a Dev crash when compiling a selected function in the Shader Editor.
• Fixed a Dev crash when setting a breakpoint on the last line in the VSL Editor.
• "Alt+F" no longer worked when returning from FullScreen in the VSL/Shader Editor.
• Unused character animations did not appear in the Unused Object Explorer dialog.
• Parameter Operation dialog box now has the correct "Tab" order.
• Fixed a Dev crash when resizing a texture in Discard Mode.
• Snapping Mode keyboard shortcut changed from "S" to "K" in the 3D View to prevent accidental "Ctrl+S" typos.
• A warning text now appears in the Texture Setup stating that discarded textures can only be seen in the 3D View.
• In the VSL/Shader Editor, Overwriting Mode and "Backspace" in specific circumstances could make Undo invalid.
• Adding, compiling then removing a VSL action could crash DEV.
• Adding new BBs in the schematic while stopped on a VSL breakpoint could crash DEV.
• Added the possibility to write in an input parameter of type ObjectArray in VSL.
• A warning text now appears in the Texture Setup saying that discarded texture can only be seen in the 3D view.
• A .dds texture like cubemap, float texture and volumemap can now be drag and dropped into the texture setup (no need to manually create a discarded texture).
• Shader Editor:
  • When a shader was deleted, and another created, the list of existing shaders was not refreshed correctly.
  • TEXTURE semantic can be associated with a texture2d, texture, texture 3d, texturecube.
• When picking a character, holding the ALT key only selected the underlying bodypart.
• Multiple variable declarations would not autocomplete in VSL editor (ie Vector a,b; => autocompletion for  variable a did not work)
  
  

Misc. Bug Fixes

• If a TextureRender BB was used before calling a 2D Pick BB, invalid results were returned when picking.
• When trying to drag and drop an animation onto a character that was copied, the animation was not attributed correctly since the bodypart names had been renamed (.Copy).
• The Behavior AppWizard produced an incorrect cpp file.
• Quaternion could not be automatically converted to strings.
  

Building Block Bug Fixes

• Optimizations/System/Statistics BB: Added video memory statistics.
• Narratives/Object Manager/Sound Load BB: Changing the setting "Use Asynchronized Loading" could make invalid links in the Schematic View.
• Grids/Path Finding/Grid Path Init BB: Executing this BB multiple times could crash Dev.
• Interface BBs:
  • A 2D text rendered in background mode would make the following renderings invalid. (Z test disabled...)
  • A non True Type font could not be displayed using the interface building blocks on Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows SE.
• Visuals/Shadows/Shadow Caster BB:
  • If a light was too close of an object that should cast a shadow, the shadow would not appear.
  • ShadowCaster did not work with objects using alpha tests.
• Logics/Messages/GetDataMessage BB : BB would not retrieve data from the same message sent multiple times to the same object in a single frame.
• Visuals/FX/Camera Color Filter BB: Rendering could be incorrect.
• Visuals/FX/Replace Rendering BB: The "Per Object" setting did not work. The BB would only apply to the targeted object and not all the objects sharing the same mesh.
• 3D Transformations/Curve/Remove Control Point BB : Removing a null control point could make the BB execute at every frame.
• Characters/Unlimitted Controller BB: Animation Transition and Secondary Animation Play Mode parameter type are now visible and can be used in other parameters.
• Collision BBs : The normal provided by floormanager::GetNearestFloor was not normalized when the floor was not scaled to one unit.
• Narratives/Attach script BB: Only scripts can now be attached, not other types of behavior such as graphs or BBs.
• Visuals/Volumetric Fog BB: Now works with several camera viewpoints (for instance, when using Render in RTView BB).
  

Rendering Engine Bug Fixes

• Tangent space information was not reconstructed correctly when loading a skinned mesh.
• Tangent spaces are build correctly now for meshes with different UV clusters.
• Xbox antialiasing fixed.
• Xbox vertex/index buffer leak fixed.
• Vertex shaders (not pixel shaders) can now be emulated on non-shader-capable cards.
• 2DEntities render callbacks were not called correctly.
• When using material channels, the rendering could be incorrect if the mesh did not use a base material with a texture.
• If hardware skinning was chosen once and then removed on a bodypart, its mesh's vertex buffer would contain unnecessary information.
• Loading meshes with more than 65536 faces could crash Dev. While there is still this limitation on the number of vertices (which must be less than 65535), there is no limit on the number of faces.
• Changing the antialiasing variable in Play Mode could cause primitives such as fonts and rectangles to flicker.
• RenderScene in RTview with a cubemap target did not work properly.
• Changing a mesh's effect did not always recreate the mesh's vertex buffer correctly.
• Texture Discard mode would not work correctly on the OpenGL rasterizer.
• Skinning was done after pre-render callbacks making behavior such as SkinJoin fail with skinned characters.
• Texture coordinate generation for cubemap did not work in OpenGL. SkyAround (CubeMap) BB did not work in OpenGL.

Web Player Bug Fixes

• Netscape plugin now functions like the IE plugin for the current URL: it points to the vmo address and not the HTML page.
• Netscape plugin opened registry keys in the correct mode for restricted users.
• Random values were always the same in the Web Player.

Exporters

• Added support for DDS files.
• 3DSMax:
  • Added better support for shell material for baking in Max 6 and 7.
  • Added an option to avoid removing redundant keys when exporting an animation.
  • Added an option to Export Both Materials of a Shell Material type.
• Maya:
  • Added:
    - Support for ikHandle animations without using sample animations.
    - "Force Keyframe Creation on Inanimate Objects" + "with at least one Keyframe" settings added.
    - "Export Helpers" setting added (objects that are not bones and are without child and mesh are not exported).
    - "Export Sets as Groups" setting added (export selection set as groups in Virtools Dev).
    - "Export Selection Hierarchy" setting added (children of selected object are exported too).
    - Support for .DDS textures
    
  • Corrected:
    -Character export: improved, works with multi-mesh and multi-skinned characters. (Read the section on Character Modelling Conventions.)

SDK New Functionalities

• CKShader interface was changed to support DirectX 9.0c changes.
• Added new pixel formats for floating point textures.
• VxMatrix::OrthographicRect fixed.
• CKRenderContext::GetSurfacesVideoMemoryOccupation added
• Added a function to flush the pending GPU commands CKRenderContext::FlushPendingGPUCommands.
  

SDK Bug Fixes

• GetHierarchicalBox(Local) returned invalid boxes (too big) for objects that did not have children.
• Player source code did not go from windowed to fullscreen correctly.
  

Virtools VR Pack (Only available to VR Pack license holders)

New Features

• VRRemoteDaemonSetup.exe is now available in the VRRemote directory to simplify the VR Pack Remote Daemon installation on each cluster hosts.
• A new VR Has Projection Ref BB has been added to know if a camera is using an asymetric rendering and if so, to retrieve its projection plane.
• The VRPlayer now logs a warning in the console window when you try to load a composition made with a Virtools Dev version that is more recent than the VRPlayer itself. When this happens, you need to use a more recent VRPlayer.
• You can now specify several resource file paths with the VRResources token.
• The ForceUseAspectRatio token is now obsolete and has been replaced by the ForceIgnoreAspectRatio . And when this token is not specified, the VRPlayer uses the following default values: 1 for multiple views, 0 for single view.
• A Resources Token has been added to allow you to separate the definition of:
  • common system resources with the VRResources token
  • application specific resources with the Resources token.

Bug corrections and optimizations

• Parameters of variable sizes and more specifically strings are now shared properly.
• When the application starts in the VRPlayer, the GetLastCmoLoaded variable now behaves like in Virtools Dev, i.e. returns an absolute path to the loaded file.
• The Software Swaplock has been improved by forcing the graphics card to terminate all pending commands before the pre-swap message exchange (see Swaplock table). This feature is only available on the dx9 and OpenGL (normal and stereo) rasterizers.
• The Software Swaplock now works properly when using the VRPlayer with multiple views.
• The CreateVRPlayer.bat batch file now overrides everything in the destination directory to avoid version problems.
• The wma reader plugin is now obsolete in Virtools Dev. It has been replaced by the wav player; therefore, an error dialog no longer appears on computers without Windows Media Player.
• Now, you can use " " delimiters for both the executable and the virtools target files in the VRPlayer starting command line.
• Each time you start the VRRemoteDaemon , its log file is emptied before starting the new session, to avoid having its file size increase infinitely.
• The following problems in the "vrpnSASSimul" resource graph have been fixed:
• Joystick output value are now clamped to [-1, 1] instead [-0.3, 0.3]
• When moving the VR Center, the wand sometimes rotated alone. This is no longer the case.
• When you specify the same host several times in your configuration file, the VRRemote Controller outputs an error and will not start the application.
• VRShowcase, Compo, ChateauLaval: Priority problems have been fixed, which could have caused improper synchronisation on a cluster.

Virtools Server Bug Fix (Only available to Server license holders)

Multiplayer Module Bug Fixes

• Corrected bugs when sending parameter values over the network.
• When a composition was reset, a lag could have occured while trying to deconnect from a server.