There are a lot of bug fixes and performance improvements over the previous versions. We have reduced the rendering time to a third by implementing several WebGL performance tricks.

Feel free to check the demo page.

Fixed Bugs

  • camera type undefined when creating a camera.
  • longShot after setRoll works now (vxlCamera)
  • the azimuth and elevation are now recalculated (inverted) when changing from ORBITING or EXPLORING to TRACKING and viceversa. After this fix, the camera does not ‘get lost’ after changing the type when it moves again.
  • when setting setWorldRotation(true) and back to setWorldRotation(false) the camera does not get lost. The angles are recalculated.
  • the vxlCamera.translate works as expected. The camera is translated by a vector
  • the vxlCamera.pan method has been revisited.

New Features

  •  Models now have unique object identifiers UID. This is fundamental for geometry catching in the render engine.
  • Materials can be cloned now with vxlMaterial.clone()
  • Now camera operations can be chained (similar to actor operations): 
    var cam = vxl.c.camera;
cam.longShot().status();
cam.setAzimuth(30).setElevation(40);

 

Performance Review

  • jQuery support: Upgraded from 1.5.1 to 2.1
  • Voxelent now uses the latest gl-matrix version: 2.2.1: This was a MAJOR pain in the BHIND but it needed to be done. Previous version was 1.3.4 and the syntax of the library is completely different now! Updating vxlCamera was quite commendable.
  • vxlActor.clone method has been revisited and cleaned up
  • vxlRenderEngine has been completely revamped. Thanks to geometry catching (instead of actor catching) it renders in a 3rd of the time compared to previous versions.
  • The amount of memory used by the vxlPicker class has been reduced considerably by eliminating the huge tridimensional associative array _hmap. In previous versions this created a cube [r,g,b] storing on each position the cell or the object that had that color. Instead of this the color is stored as hex value in an unidimensional associative array (hashmap).
  • The try/catch blocks have been removed from vxlRenderEngine, after reading http://ryanmorr.com/reinventing-the-try-catch-block/
  • the WebGL buffers for each actor are only recreated when the actor requires reallocation (after morphing or texturing for example) to cause reallocation use vxlActor.reallocate()

Refactoring / Clean Up

  • vxlActor clean up from previous versions: gl_buffers, renderers attributes these are now obsolete as the actors do not know anything about their rendering thanks to vxlEngine and its subclasses.
  • there is no WebGL code in vxlRenderer. All the WebGL code has been moved to the vxlEngine class.
  • the vxlProgramManager is an attribute of vxlEngine. There is no dependency
  • between the vxlRenderer and the vxlProgramManager anymore. This makes the code of vxlRenderer more compact and maintanable.
  • Now any Engine can use the inherited vxlProgramManager [through the attribute this.pm] to
  • facilitate working with ESSL programs.
  • The code of vxlRenderEngine has been modified accordingly to work with this refactoring, all the references to this.renderer.gl and this.renderer.pm have been replaced by this.gl and this.pm (check this change in action in demo-bouncing-balls.html)
  • the code of vxlProgramManager has been updated and simplified
  • the vxlPickerInteractor calls the renderer.readOffscreenPixel which in
  • turn delegates this call to the engine. There’s no gl code floating around the vxlRenderer anymore. This provide better encapsulation and separation of concerns.
  • vxlBlenderProgram and vxlBlenderEngine have been deleted! There is no reason for this. The blender obj imported models will work with the existing engines.