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

4.0.0

Major updates

• Added support for parallel shader compilation (Deltakosh) @NEED DEMO- Added FlyCamera for free navigation in 3D space, with a limited set of settings (Phuein) @NEED DEMO- Added Object Based Motion Blur post-process (julien-moreau) @NEED DEMO- WebXR (TrevorDev)
  • Add customAnimationFrameRequester to allow sessions to hook into engine's render loop (TrevorDev)
  • camera customDefaultRenderTarget to allow cameras to render to a custom render target (eg. xr framebuffer) instead of the canvas (TrevorDev)
  • webXR camera which can be updated by a webXRSession (TrevorDev)
  • webXRSessionManager to bridge xrSession to babylon's engine/camera (TrevorDev)

Updates

GUI

• Added button.image and button.textBlock to simplify access to button internal parts (Deltakosh)

Core Engine

• Refactored of the SolidParticleSystem code for performance and code quality improvement (barroij)
• Added utility function Tools.BuildArray for array initialisation (barroij)
• Introduced a new IOfflineSupport interface to hide IndexedDB (Deltakosh)
• PBRMaterial and StandardMaterial now use hot swapping feature for shaders. This means they can keep using a previous shader while a new one is being compiled (Deltakosh)
• Performance oriented changes (barroij)
  • Prevented avoidable matrix inversion or square root computation
  • Enabled a removal in O(1) from the transformNodes array and materials array of the Scene. As a consequence, the order of the element within these arrays might change during a removal
  • Enabled a removal in O(1) from the instances array of a Mesh. As a consequence, the order of the element within this array might change during a removal
  • Stopped calling Array.splice on the scene.meshes array and on the engine._uniformBuffer when removing an element. As a consequence, the order of the element within these arrays might change during a removal
  • Added an option useMaterialMeshMap in the Scene constructor options. When set to true, each Material isntance will have and will keep up-to-date a map of its bound meshes. This is to avoid browsing all the meshes of the scene to retrieve the ones bound to the current material when disposing the Material. Disabled by default
  • Added an option useClonedMeshhMap in the Scene constructor options. When set to true, each Mesh will have and will keep up-to-date a map of cloned meshes. This is to avoid browsing all the meshes of the scene to retrieve the ones that have the current mesh as source mesh. Disabled by default
  • Added blockfreeActiveMeshesAndRenderingGroups property in the Scene, following the same model as blockMaterialDirtyMechanism. This is to avoid calling Scene.freeActiveMeshes and Scene.freeRenderingGroups for each disposed mesh when we dispose several meshes in a row. One have to set blockfreeActiveMeshesAndRenderingGroups to true just before disposing the meshes, and set it back to false just after
  • Prevented code from doing useless and possible time consuming computation when disposing the ShaderMaterial of a LinesMesh

glTF Loader

glTF Serializer

Viewer

Materials Library

Bug fixes

• Add missing effect layer to asset container (TrevorDev)

Core Engine

• Fixed a bug with mesh.alwaysSelectAsActiveMesh preventing layerMask to be taken in account (Deltakosh)
• Fixed a bug with pointer up being fire twice (Deltakosh)
• Fixed a bug with particle systems being update once per camera instead of once per frame (Deltakosh)
• Fixed the LineEdgesRenderer used for edge rendering of LinesMesh handle properly LinesMesh made of disconnected lines + Make it work for instance of LinesMesh (barroij)

Viewer

Loaders

Breaking changes

• Database.IDBStorageEnabled is now false by default (Deltakosh)
• Database.openAsync was renamed by Database.open (Deltakosh)
• scene.database was renamed to scene.offlineProvider (Deltakosh)