Somehow missed this announcement in the chaos of the last few weeks. It was only via this comment I became aware of the release. Anyways Havok have released a pretty massive update to Project Anarchy, their free for mobile, cross platform gaming engine. The star of the release is integration of Autodesk BEAST lighting solution and a new water system, but that’s only a small part. Post below verbatim is the contents of the release:
We are happy to announce the release of Project Anarchy v2014.0.5. It is now available to download. This release contains a host of new features and improvements. The v2014.0.5 release also adds Autodesk® Beast® as a fully integrated component at no charge and includes a new mobile water shape.
Additionally, you can find a number of usability improvements for vForge such as better gizmos and a new transform panel. For easy and quick prototyping we have added several primitive assets that are directly shipped with the Project Anarchy package.
Below you’ll find some highlights for the changes in v2014.0.5. For a full list of changes please take a look at our documentation.
Autodesk Beast Plugin
With Project Anarchy v2014.0.5 we include our integration of the powerful global illumination lighting solution Autodesk Beast.
With Beast, you can generate amazingly realistic lightmaps and lightgrids directly from within vForge, and even distribute the computation workload among multiple machines using DistriBeast. The features of Beast can be considered as a superset of the default vLux integration. Summarized, it has the following strengths when compared to vLux lighting:
- Faster computation times that scales well on n-cores and in some cases orders of magnitude faster if global illumination is enabled
- Support for new light shapes: window light, area light
- Tighter packing on lightmaps to save texture memory
- Realtime preview through eRnsT tool
- Better scalability for larger scenes with its support for instanced geometry
The Beast integration can be used for free in the context of Project Anarchy.
In order to activate Beast, open any scene, go to the menu Lighting->Active Lighting Tool and checkmark “Autodesk Beast”. Once this is done Beast will be used when you re-calculate the lighting.
New Mobile Water Shape
A specialized mobile water shape has been added in v2014.0.5. This shape implements specially optimized water rendering for mobile devices. For more details see "Mobile Water Introduction" in the Project Anarchy documentation.
The mobile water shape is located in the effects shape section and can be added to your scene by dragging and dropping an instance of the mobile water shape from the shape creator panel.
New Search Bar in Shape Panel
There is now a search bar in the Shape panel that can be used to filter all objects by name.
Asset Browser Improvements
- The path to a file can now be copied from the asset browser.
- When Perforce is used assets can now be checked out directly.
- Particle Effects are now shown in the asset browser and can be added to the scene via drag & drop.
- Static meshes are now also shown while dragging them from the asset browser into the scene and snap-to-grid is now also working while dragging meshes into the scene.
New primitive meshes for easy prototyping
In the base data directory there are now some primitive meshes that can be used for quick and easy prototyping and blocking out of a level. Material sets are also available to facilitate color coding sections. On a static mesh instance, see the properties, there is a property called ‘CustomMaterialSet’, which contains variants for different colors.
New Transform Bar
We have added a ‘transform bar’ to the bottom of the viewport. The transform bar allows quick and easy changing of the position, rotation and scaling of selected objects. Values can be input both relative to the current value, or absolute.
New Script List Panel
There is now a ‘Script List’ panel, which shows all the scripts that are used in the scene. You can open the scripts in the script editor directly from that list and you can see which shapes use that list and select them.
vForge Grid Improvements
The grid in vForge has been improved with a number of visual and UX improvements:
- In ortho mode it now consistently displays in the viewing plane and the grid gets less detailed when zooming out.
- Lines can be highlighted at user-defined regular intervals.
- In perspective mode the grid now follows the camera and the grid size is fixed.
Improved Gizmos and ‘Stick to Ground‘ Feature
- The ‘Stick to Ground’ feature for the move gizmo has been improved significantly. It can now correctly handle indoor levels comprising of different stories or levels.
- The scaling gizmo has been improved. Scaling is now much smoother and the center handle of the gizmo now does uniform scaling dropping the need for an extra mode.
- The translation gizmo now shows helper lines to make it easier to place objects.
General vForge Improvements
- In the Visual Shader Editor, you can now zoom in with CTRL+Mousewheel.
- vForge now automatically makes a backup of the scene when entering Run-in-Editor or Play-the-Game mode. Should that crash the editor, on the next start vForge will prompt to use that backup or continue.
- The multi-user editing dialog will now retrieve more descriptive errors from Perforce in case connecting or workspace resolving fails.
Scaleform Integration Improvements
- The access to the ActionScript state has been refactored.
- The new VScaleformValue and VScaleformVariable classes now also allow invoking functions and accessing class members.
- As opposed to VScaleformValue, an instance of the VScaleformVariableclass represents an ActionScript variable and its value is always kept in sync with the value in the movie.
General Improvements for Programmers
- Double Tap via remote input is now supported.
- Cubemap Textures that use the PVR format are now loading correctly.
- The depth-fog settings are now exposed to Lua, so they can be changed at runtime from script.
- There is now a new function on the ragdoll component to apply a force or impulse to bones that are inside a sphere. This can be used to create explosions and other effects that push or pull objects within a defined area.
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