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  • Plane9 v1.7 has been released

    published on 2/22/2011 7:31 PM

    The next version of the visualizer is hot of the presses and its one very feature packed release.

    But before we go into the release details I want to show my appreciation to the paying supporters of the visualizer and announce that 10 scenes are released exclusively for them. Registered users should receive them shortly. You can also log in to your web page account, or register one if you don't have one, and enter in your serial number under your accounts page. This will open up the customer page of the website where you can download the exclusive scenes. Thanks again for you support.

    Here are the changes that have gone into this release Added

    • Engine: 46 new scenes
    • Engine: Editor and screensaver can now react to what is currently playing. So even if you have an unsupported application like itunes or spotify running in the background it will now react to the music! Only works on Vista/Windows 7.
    • Engine: CopyTexture node. Copies another texture to a new possibly smaller texture
    • Engine: Blur node can now specify radius of blur
    • Engine: 2d fluid node
    • Engine: Multicolor gradient texture node. Can create linear, radial, cone and square gradients with any center or rotation. Very good for color lookup tables
    • Engine: Lightning bolt node
    • Engine: Ribbon node. Creates ribbon strips using an expression
    • Engine: SignalGenerator node that can generate sine,triangle,square,sawtooth and random waveforms
    • Engine: Noise node creates a tillable noise texture in 1-3 dimensions
    • Engine: Shader ports have a few, very powerful, predefined functions. See the [url:Wiki|http://www.plane9.com/wiki] for details
    • Engine: expression ports now have the functions rand() and srand() that uses seed value from a special port and has a much better random than the functions that take in a seed
    • Engine: expression port new functions time() and date()
    • Engine: PI,PI2 as define in shaders
    • Engine: Shader ports define tex1size/tex2size/tex3size that contains the texture size in pixels
    • Engine: Stop logging after writing more than 100kb during one session
    • Engine: File texture node handles any texture size
    • Engine: Support for 1d and 3d textures
    • Engine: Added tangent and binormal to mesh objects
    • Engine: Waveform & spectrum supports a mono channel output when specifying channel as -1
    • Engine: Added Camera FOV to RenderObject node Breaking change. Previous fov was 28, it's now 45
    • Engine: Anonymous usage information is periodically sent to help improve the visualizer. For details see the [url:faq|http://www.plane9.com/faq]
    • Engine: Screenshots now include the name of the scene(s) that where rendered
    • Editor: New much improved editor for shaders and math. Supports search & replace, intellisense, snippets, goto, unlimited undo and a lot more
    • Editor: Color ports now show the color and have a picker dialog that can be shown
    • Editor: Frames per second is shown on the status bar

    Changed

    • Engine: Rewritten blur node
    • Engine: Rewritten multimonitor support
    • Engine: Changed expression ports noise1/2/3 to use simplex noise instead of perlin noise
    • Engine: Resource leak when using renderbuffers like the blur/glow effect
    • Engine: Disc/Cylinder nodes places a center vertex in the end caps now to make it easier with vertex manipulation on the meshes
    • Engine: CloneExpressionNode center option now always centers all objects. No matter the distance between each object
    • Engine: Large visual improvement on texture quality
    • Engine: Fixed truncation of log if its larger than 100kb when starting
    • Engine: Oscilloscope node was missing to update one line
    • Engine: RenderObject scale by aspect now works correctly even if the object is rotating
    • Engine: Point and Line primitive types works
    • Engine: All old scenes have been improved with the new glow/blur, fullscreen render node and the like
    • Editor: Crash when no node is selected and clicking create folder
    • Editor: Double click on folder showed empty scene
    • Engine: Expression smoothstep arguments have been changed to match smoothstep in shaders to avoid confusion. Now they are in the form "smoothstep(min, max, value)" Breaking change
    • Engine: 'Dont render this monitor' didn't cover the screen with a black window
    • Editor: Crash when clearing rect port values
    • Editor: Random crashes when editing variables/functions in expression ports
    • Editor: Moved galaxy, grass & starfields nodes into a 'nature' group
    • Editor: Nicer property descriptions
    • Editor: Fixed bug that overwrote port values when selecting another node that had the same port names
    • Engine: Handle scene load failure better
    • Config: Remade registration dialog to be easier to enter serial

    Deprecated/Removed

    • Engine: Sin node has been deprecated. Use the new SignalGenerator instead
    • Installer: Removed noise1,noise2,noise3,noise4,noise5 file textures. Use RandomTexture,NoiseTexture or a shader instead Breaking change
    • Installer: Removed snowflake file texture. Only one scene used it so not worth the added size. Replaced with simple shader Breaking change