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What's New
[3.4]

Overview

The focus of RenderWare Graphics 3.4 is to strengthen the underlying technology and improve performance across all of the platforms. We have also responded to many customer requests and endeavored to develop as many of these as were practically possible.

Exporter SDK

New for RenderWare Graphics 3.4 is the powerful Exporter Framework that allows you to make a whole range of modifications, additions and replacements in the art asset export process. Consisting of a series of modular libraries and custom code hooks, you could soon be introducing new common classes to the modelers, changing behaviors or creating new object handlers under our plugin architecture.

To get you started, we have provided the following four examples of what you can do with the new SDK:

Applying per vertex operations (e.g. custom pre lighting)
Applying per scene graph node operations (e.g. an export object filter)
Applying custom export actions (e.g. a texture optimizer)
Extending the standard exporter user interface

Animation Toolkit

We now provide a generic animation toolkit, for both hierarchical and non-hierarchical animation. This allows you to key-frame any parameter, as long as code has been provided to handle it.

RpHAnim also uses the toolkit, with an HAnim interpolator being is provided to transform e.g. rotate or translate, frames within the hierarchy.

See Examples.

Enhancements - Art Tools

Art tools remain a key part of our development with RenderWare Graphics, and as part of the 3.4 release they have seen many significant improvements and enhancements that build on the solid foundation we created in RenderWare Graphics 3.3. All in all, we are confident that RenderWare Graphics 3.4 provides an unsurpassed art to engine pathway for the quick and easy preparation of game-ready assets.

Please note though, this is the second milestone in our program of onward development of our art tools as we shall continue to focus on enhancing the RenderWare Graphics art to engine pathway in release 3.5 and beyond.

Pre-instancer

This is a new tool, capable of optimizing art assets for all platforms. It converts platform-independent RenderWare Graphics files into console-specific data. This instanced form uses a smaller memory footprint and is ready-to-render in a game.

Artists can convert their artwork into a console-optimized form directly from the exporters and engineers can launch a command-line version of the tool, 'instance', which can also be incorporated into a game production build.

The instancing step is recommended in any game production tool-chain; the pre-instancing tool makes this process easy and convenient.

Visualizer

We have made many enhancements to the Visualizer, ranging from UI improvements such as platform specific metrics displays, more efficient memory usage, enabled PVS and particles, plus improved stability.

World Sectorization in Exporters

Artist control of the world sectorization process has been greatly improved. We now provide nine artist-selectable partitioning methods tuned to different scene types. Sectorization results can now be viewed directly from with the art package and sectorization "hints" added to influence the sectorization process.

Skin Splitter

This new toolkit supports the splitting of skinned meshes to a set number of bones, allowing us to increase the maximum bone limits from 64 to 256.

PVS Editor

We now provide a PVS editing tool, which comes as a standalone application.

Tri-stripping

We have added a new 'Tunneling' algorithm resulting in significant performance gains for all platforms.

Improved Bézier Patches on 3ds max

Advanced data exporting is now supported, e.g. smoothing groups are now enabled. Patches also provide excellent performance due to the automated tri-stripping, so why not investigate this alternative to conventional mesh construction.

Build Manager (source distributions only)

RenderWare Graphics Builder

We have produced a GUI-driven build manager, to simplify SDK and application building across all platforms.

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What's New [3.4]