1coin250(3)                           Coin                           coin250(3)
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NAME

6       coin250 - New Features in Coin v2.5.0 This is a brief summary of the
7       new features in Coin v2.5.0, grouped by feature category.
8

Geographical Data Support

10       The Geopgraphic Data Support nodes are partly based on GeoVRML
11       (http://www.geovrml.org/), and partly based on our own UTM-nodes which
12       can be found in the SmallChange library.
13
14       The Geographic Data Support nodes makes it possible to create e.g.
15       globe-spanning models that you can navigate around in without getting
16       into float precision problems ('the shakes'). Some assistance from the
17       application code is needed for this though; it is not a fully automatic
18       solution.
19
20       New nodes:
21
22       · SoGeoOrigin
23
24       · SoGeoLocation
25
26       · SoGeoSeparator
27
28       · SoGeoCoordinate
29
30       In addition to new nodes, SoCamera and its derived nodes have been
31       updated to support the SoGeoOrigin node.
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33       The coordinate system support in the above nodes are currently a bit
34       lacking (only a few systems/zones are supported), but this will improve
35       over time. API-changes should not be needed to extend this, so
36       patchlevel releases would be enough to add more coordinate systems.
37
38       The VRML2 counterparts of the above nodes, which would be a subpart of
39       implementing the GeoVRML extension, are not yet in development, but
40       they might show up for the next major release since a big part of the
41       implementation will be shared.
42
43       Note: These above SoGeo*-nodes make the UTM*-nodes in the SmallChange
44       library obsolete (for anyone who uses those), so the support for those
45       nodes will eventually be deprecated and removed. They won't be removed
46       over night though, but for new users: avoid starting to use the
47       UTM*-nodes at all cost to avoid having to waste time on a port down the
48       line.
49

Generic GLSL Shader Support

51       Shader support is implemented through a set of new shader nodes, more
52       or less compatible with the corresponding TGS extensions. Beyond GLSL,
53       Coin also supports ARB shaders and Cg shaders (if the Cg library is
54       installed). However, we will only recommend the use of the shader
55       language GLSL and put our focus on that one.
56
57       New nodes:
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59       · SoShaderProgram
60
61       · SoVertexShader
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63       · SoFragmentShader
64
65       · SoGeometryShader
66
67       See also the 'Shaders in Coin' page for more information.
68

Generic Shadow Rendering Functionality

70       Support for rendering shadows has been added to Coin through a set of
71       shader-based nodes. The technique used is the Variance Shadow Maps
72       technique (http://www.punkuser.net/vsm/).
73
74       New nodes:
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76       · SoShadowGroup
77
78       · SoShadowCulling
79
80       · SoShadowStyle
81

Vertex Buffer Object (VBO) Usage

83       A lot of nodes have had their rendering code optimized for VBO usage,
84       giving great performance increases. However, this is not universally
85       enabled - it is necessary to organize the scene graphs in specific ways
86       for VBOs to be used.
87
88       See the VBO Rendering in Coin  page for a detailed description.
89
90       Relevant classes:
91
92       · SoVertexProperty
93
94       · SoReorganizeAction
95

Expanded Sb* Class Collection

97       The set of Sb* classes in Coin has been expanded greatly, with most
98       notable a whole skew of SbVec and SbBox classes. The reasoning behind
99       this move was that historically these classes were just added as
100       needed, one by one, causing the stable branch of Coin and the
101       development branch of Coin to diverge and become more and more
102       incompatible as time went by. Also, extension nodes were created in
103       peripheral libraries that used these new classes from the Coin
104       development branch, and consequently couldn't be built gainst the
105       stable branch of Coin. With this preemptive class set expansion, we
106       hope to cause that the Coin stable branch and the Coin development
107       branch stay closer in sync over a longer period, and that the
108       incompatibility divergence will happen around major new feature sets
109       instead of around minor details.
110
111       New Sb*-classes:  SbBox2i32, SbBox3i32, SbBox3d, SbVec2b, SbVec2ub,
112       SbVec2us, SbVec2i32, SbVec2ui32, SbVec3b, SbVec3ub, SbVec3us,
113       SbVec3i32, SbVec3ui32, SbVec4b, SbVec4ub, SbVec4s, SbVec4us, SbVec4i32,
114       SbVec4ui32, SbXfBox3d
115
116       Note: You can also find a good deal of these classes in TGS Inventor,
117       so this was also a TGS compatibility move.
118

Expanded Field Class Collection

120       The exact same reasoning as for the Sb*-classes goes for the field
121       classes.
122
123       New field classes:  SoSFBox2s, SoSFBox2i32, SoSFBox2d, SoSFBox2d,
124       SoSFBox3i32, SoSFBox3d, SoSFColorRGBA, SoSFDouble, SoSFVec2b,
125       SoSFVec2i32, SoSFVec2d, SoSFVec3b, SoSFVec3i32, SoSFVec4b, SoSFVec4ub,
126       SoSFVec4s, SoSFVec4us, SoSFVec4i32, SoSFVec4ui32, SoSFVec4d,
127       SoMFColorRGBA, SoMFDouble, SoMFVec2b, SoMFVec2s, SoMFVec2i32,
128       SoMFVec2d, SoMFVec3b, SoMFVec3s, SoMFVec3i32, SoMFVec4b, SoMFVec4ub,
129       SoMFVec4s, SoMFVec4us, SoMFVec4i32, SoMFVec4ui32, SoMFVec4d
130

SoFrustumCamera node

132       This node is added to make it possible to set up a custom camera with
133       full control over the view volume. SoFrustumCamera is basically a
134       mapping of the OpenGL glFrustum() method.
135
136       The typical use of SoFrustumCamera is in a CAVE or MultiPipe
137       environment where it's often necessary to set up cameras based on the
138       configuration of the different displays.
139

Miscellaneous

141       Below follows a non-exhaustive list of other, more minor, tweaks and
142       tidbits.
143
144   SoSearchAction on SoFile nodes
145       To facilitate control over whether an SoFile node should traverse its
146       children during an SoSearchAction traversal, two static methods have
147       been added to SoFile.
148
149       New functions:
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151       · SoFile::setSearchOK() [static]
152
153       · SoFile::getSearchOK() [static]
154
155   SbTypeInfo<T> template type information library
156       For those who write generic code using C++ templates, a template type
157       information library has been added for the primitive Coin-types, so you
158       can use type relations for populating a template instead of needing
159       template parameters for all changing types of the template, or you can
160       write generic code on type attributes like the number of dimensions of
161       an SbVec class. SbTypeInfo<T> can be found in Inventor/SbTypeInfo.h.
162
163   Visual Studio Projects
164       The Visual Studio projects have been split into projects for separately
165       building, installing, uninstalling the Coin SDK, and document
166       generation. This was done primarily to be able to build without
167       automatically performing the installation procedure at the same time,
168       but also to offer other supplementary targets later like the doc-
169       generation project...
170
171       New features for Coin v2.4.0 are here.
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175Version 2.5.0                   Tue Nov 8 2011                      coin250(3)
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