Magnum 2018.04 released — with custom renderer support
The new release brings more flexibility to asset management and rendering abstractions, improves plugin handling and showcases Leap Motion integration.
The new release brings more flexibility to asset management and rendering abstractions, improves plugin handling and showcases Leap Motion integration.
I made a brief detour on the way to Vulkan support and equipped Magnum with features that make plugin workflow nicer and open up new possibilities.
The new Magnum milestone brings WebGL 2.0 and WebAssembly, VR support, lots of niceties for Windows users, iOS port, new experimental UI library, improved testing capabilities, support for over 80 new asset formats, new examples and much more.
Magnum docs were missing the search functionality for some time because I wanted to implement it properly for the new theme. The proper implementation is now ready.
A new Magnum example implements an analytic method for area light shading presented in the paper “Real-Time Polygonal-Light Shading with Linearly Transformed Cosines”, by Eric Heitz, Jonathan Dupuy, Stephen Hill and David Neubelt.
The new website does a better job at clearly presenting engine features and enables the team to share progress easier than before. Besides that, its development resulted in many valuable byproducts for both C++ developers and web content publishers.
Along with dropped support for NaCl, Magnum now has first-class WebAssembly support. I also took this opportunity to overhaul the outdated Showcase page with WebAssembly builds and there is a bunch more Emscripten-related goodies all over the place!
The Magnum C++11/C++14 and OpenGL graphics engine gained OpenGEX format support, a bunch of new importer plugins, cross-platform extension loader, transform feedback support and new features from OpenGL ES 3.1 and OpenGL 4.5, among other things.
The Magnum C++11 and OpenGL/OpenGL ES/WebGL graphics engine gained experimental Android support, windowless applications on OS X and Windows, uses SDL2 as the default toolkit, adds new texture and mesh features, improves build system and got huge documentation review.
After reading the “How to draw a red square in Qt Quick” blog post showcasing the simplicity of Qt API I thought it would be interesting to try something similar in Magnum for comparison.