Babylon.js/dist/preview release/what's new.md

4.1.0

Major updates

• WIP: Node Material (NEED DOC OR SAMPLES) (Deltakosh)
• WIP: Node material editor (NEED OR AND VIDEOS) (Deltakosh / TrevorDev)
• WIP: WebGPU support (NEED DOC OR SAMPLES) (Sebavan)
• .basis texture file format support Doc (TrevorDev)
• WIP: Recast navigation mesh and crowd of moving agents Demo (CedricGuillemet)
• Added Points Cloud Particle System (JohnK)
• Classes decoupling ending up with smaller bundle sizes Blog (Deltakosh)
• Babylon.js controls Doc (Sebavan / Deltakosh)
• WebXR updates:
  • WebXR updated to spec as of July 10th (TrevorDev)
  • WebXR webVR parity helpers (Vive, WMR, Oculus Rift) (TrevorDev)
• Added support for Offscreen canvas Doc (Deltakosh

Updates

General

• Added support for dual shock gamepads (Deltakosh)
• Support Vive Focus 3Dof controller (TrevorDev)
• Planar positioning support for GizmoManager (Balupg)
• Individual gizmos can now be enabled/disabled (Balupg)
• Unify preparation of instance attributes. Added MaterialHelper.PushAttributesForInstances (MarkusBillharz)
• Added support for PBR irradiance map
• Added ability to set render camera on utility layer instead of using the latest active camera (TrevorDev)
• Move normalizeToUnitCube to transformNode instead of abstract mesh and add predicate to exclude sub objects when scaling (TrevorDev)
• Method to check if device orientation is available (TrevorDev)
• Added support for sound sprites Doc (Deltakosh)
• Display Oculus Quest controller when using a Quest in WebVR (TrevorDev)
• Added startAndReleaseDragOnPointerEvents property to pointerDragBehavior which can be set to false for custom drag triggering (TrevorDev)
• Added optional picking predicate to pointerDragBehavior for filtering affected meshes (Exolun)
• Effect renderer to render one or multiple shader effects to a texture (TrevorDev)
• Added url parameters to web request modifiers (PierreLeBlond)
• Added VRExperienceHelper.exitVROnDoubleTap (Deltakosh)
• Added Scene.getTextureByUniqueID (aWeirdo)
• Added support for 180 VR videos in VideoDome (RaananW)
• Added optional parameter to use Euler angles in planeRotationGizmo (CedricGuillemet)
• Added AnimationGroup.onAnimationGroupLoopObservable (Deltakosh)

Engine

• Improved instanceMesh with user defined custom buffers Doc (Deltakosh)
• Morph targets now can morph UV channel as well (Deltakosh)
• Added MorphTarget support to the DepthRenderer, GeometryBufferRenderer and OutlineRenderer (MarkusBillharz)
• Added preprocessors for shaders to improve how shaders are compiled for WebGL1/2 or WebGPU (Deltakosh)
• Added enterPointerlock and exitPointerlock (Separated from enterFullscreen) (aWeirdo)
• Added support for vertexSource and fragmentSource parameters to ShaderMaterial (Deltakosh)

Inspector

• Added support for Euler edition only for angles (can be turned off in the new inspector settings) (Deltakosh)
• Added an option to ignore backfaces for picking (can be turned on and off in the new inspector settings) (Deltakosh)
• Added support for ShadowGenerator (Deltakosh)
• Added support for scene normalization (Deltakosh)
• Added support for morph targets (Deltakosh)
• Added context menu to add SSAORenderingPipeline and SSAO2RenderingPipeline (Deltakosh)
• Added support for texture creation and assignments per material (Deltakosh)
• Added support for occlusion properties (Deltakosh)
• Texture channels are now displayed in grayscale (Deltakosh)
• Ambiant and metallic maps are displayed correctly on PBR material even when using ORM packed texture (Deltakosh)
• Added support for inspectable strings (Deltakosh)
• Added support for CreateScreenshotUsingRenderTarget (13djwright)

Tools

• Added Tools.CreateScreenshotAsync and Tools.CreateScreenshotUsingRenderTargetAsync (mehmetoguzderin)
• Added Color3.toHSV(), Color3.toHSVToRef() and Color3.HSVtoRGBToRef() (Deltakosh)
• Added ShadowGenerator.onAfterShadowMapRenderObservable and ShadowGenerator.onAfterShadowMapMeshRenderObservable (Deltakosh)
• Added support for side by side and top bottom images in the PhotoDome (Deltakosh)
• Added playground ts-local (TypeScript support for local playground) (pjoe)
• Added RGBD Texture tools Sebavan

Meshes

• Added TransformNode.instantiateHierarchy() which try to instantiate (or clone) a node and its entire hiearchy (Deltakosh)
• Added new CreateTiledPlane and CreateTiledBox (JohnK)
• Added absolute scaling and rotation getters (haroldma)
• Added BILLBOARDMODE_USE_POSITION flag to billboards allowing use of camera positioning instead of orientation for mesh rotation (delaneyj)

Physics

• Update Ammo.js library to support global collision contact callbacks (MackeyK24)
• Update Ammo.js library to allow native capsule shape impostors (MackeyK24)
• Update Ammo.js library to allow your own broadphase overlapping pair cache (MackeyK24)
• Update Ammo.js library and AmmoJS plugin to support ellipsoid (CedricGuillemet)

Loaders

• Added support for non-float accessors in animation data for glTF loader. (bghgary)
• Support loading cube data in the .basis loader (TrevorDev)
• Load glTF extras into BJS metadata (pjoe)
• Added support for morph target names via mesh.extras.targetNames when loading a glTF (zeux)
• Added support for using HTTP range requests when loading MSFT_lod extension from a glTF binary. (bghgary)
• Added a flag to enable/disable creation of instances for glTF loader. (bghgary)
• Added an order property to glTF loader extensions to support reordering. (bghgary)

Materials

• Added ShaderMaterial.setColor4Array (JonathanTron)
• Added ShaderMaterial.setArray4 (JonathanTron)
• Added scene.environmentIntensity to control the IBL strength overall in a scene (Sebavan)
• Added support of image processing for WaterMaterial (julien-moreau)
• Added pbrBRDFConfiguration.useSpecularGlossinessInputEnergyConservation to allow Specular-Workflow energy conservation to be turned off (ColorDigital-PS).

ScreenshotTools

• Added interface for argument size of screenshot methods (Dok11)
• Implementation usage of precision in combination height and width params (Dok11)

Sounds

• Added ISoundOptions.skipCodecCheck to make Sound more flexible with URLs (nbduke)
• Added Scene.audioListenerPositionProvider property, to enable setting custom position of audio listener (Foxhoundn)

Sprites

• SpritePackedManager extends SpriteManager so that a sprite sheet with different size sprites can be used (JohnK)
• MultiPickSprite and multiPickSpriteWithRay added to sprites (JohnK)

WebXR

• Compliance with the mozilla WebXR emulator (RaananW)
• Gamepad object is now exposed in the WebXRController class (RaananW)
• If canvas does not have WebXR support the scene will still render (mainly Firefox) (RaananW)

Ray

• Added Ray.intersectsAxis to translate screen to axis coordinates without checking collisions (horusscope)

GUI

• Added xmlLoader to load GUI layouts from XML (null0924)
• Added disableMobilePrompt option to InputText for OculusQuest(and other android base VR devices) (shinyoshiaki)
• Added Button.delegatePickingToChildren to let buttons delegate hit testing to embedded controls (Deltakosh)
• Added Container.maxLayoutCycle and Container.logLayoutCycleErrors to get more control over layout cycles (Deltakosh)
• Added StackPanel.ignoreLayoutWarnings to disable console warnings when controls with percentage size are added to a StackPanel (Deltakosh)
• Added _getSVGAttribs functionality for loading multiple svg icons from an external svg file via icon id. Fixed bug for Chrome.(lockphase)

Particles

• Added the feature expandable to the Solid Particle System (jerome)
• Added the feature removeParticles() to the Solid Particle System (jerome)

Navigation Mesh

• Added moveAlong function to cast a segment on mavmesh (CedricGuillemet)

Node Material

• Added Light intensity output to LightInformationBlock (Drigax)

Documentation

• Added a note on shallow bounding of getBoundingInfo (tibotiber)
• Added a typo fix to the ArcRotateCamera setPosition method description (schm-dt)

Bug fixes

• Fixed Textblock line spacing evaluation when linespacing > 0 (Deltakosh)
• Fixed Xbox One gamepad controller button schemes (MackeyK24)
• Added support for AnimationGroup serialization (Drigax)
• Removing assetContainer from scene will also remove gui layers (TrevorDev)
• A scene's input manager not adding key listeners when the canvas is already focused (Poolminer)
• Runtime animation goToFrame when going back in time now correctly triggers future events when reached (zakhenry)
• Fixed bug in Ray.intersectsTriangle where the barycentric coordinates bu and bv being returned is actually bv and bw. (bghgary)
• Do not call onError when creating a texture when falling back to another loader (TrevorDev)
• Context loss should not cause PBR materials to render black or instances to stop rendering (TrevorDev)
• Only cast pointer ray input when pointer is locked in webVR (TrevorDev)
• Fix Right Hand coordinates with directional lights and shadows, hemispheric lights and spot lights (CedricGuillemet)
• Avoid using default utility layer in gizmo manager to support multiple scenes (TrevorDev)
• Fix bug when adding and removing observers in quick succession (sable)
• Cannon and Ammo forceUpdate will no longer cause an unexpected exception (TrevorDev)
• Loading the same multi-material twice and disposing one should not impact the other (TrevorDev)
• GLTF exporter should no longer duplicate exported texture data (Drigax)
• Avoid exception when disposing of Ammo cloth physics (TrevorDev)
• Make planeDragGizmo usable on its own (TrevorDev)
• Fix useObjectOrienationForDragging for pointerDragBehavior when using a single axis drag (TrevorDev)
• Fix VR button not positioning correctly in canvas (haroldma)
• Fix check for material needing alpha blending in OutlineRenderer (mkmc)
• Fixed: scene's input manager's detachControl doesn't remove a wheel event listener (RamilKadyrov)
• Fixed Solid Particle System particle's idx and idxInShape initialization (RamilKadyrov)
• Added in ArcRotateCamera.storeState to save targetScreenOffset, in restoreState to restore it (RamilKadyrov)
• Fixed CubeTexture to keep custom filesList when serializing/parsing (julien-moreau)
• Fixed StandardRenderingPipeline to properly dispose post-processes from attached cameras (julien-moreau)
• Fixed VolumetricLightScattering post-process to use a custom vertex shader instead of the depth vertex shader. (julien-moreau)
• Fixed missing check in sceneTreeItemComponent resulting in gizmo to not end drag (CedricGuillemet)
• Added missing callback triggers within texture loaders (PierreLeBlond)
• Fixed TextureLinkLineComponent to no longer invert inspector-loaded textures (Drigax)
• Fixed a single frame drop after leaving webxr on some devices (RaananW)
• Fixed bug where vignette aspect ratio would be wrong when rendering direct to canvas

Breaking changes

• Setting mesh.scaling to a new vector will no longer automatically call forceUpdate (this should be done manually when needed) (TrevorDev)
• Tools.ExtractMinAndMaxIndexed and Tools.ExtractMinAndMax are now ambiant functions (available on BABYLON.extractMinAndMaxIndexed and BABYLON.extractMinAndMax) (Deltakosh)
• Tools.QueueNewFrame was removed in favor of Engine.QueueNewFrame (Deltakosh)
• Removed external data from Engine (addExternalData, getExternalData, getOrAddExternalDataWithFactory, removeExternalData) (Deltakosh)
• The glTF loader extensions that map to glTF 2.0 extensions will now be disabled if the extension is not present in extensionsUsed. (bghgary)