OpenSceneGraph-2.9.7: New Release

March 9th, 2010, Author: egagnon, Categories: Modeling & Simulation

OpenSceneGraph-2.9.7, released on 22nd February 2009, key deliverables in this dev release are:
- Introduction of new serialization support in osgDB and associated src/osgWrapper/serialization plugins, which enable a new OpenSceneGraph native dual binary (.osgb) /ascii (.osgt) file format within a unified and extensible set of serialization wrappers and classes.
- Improvements to the thread safety of Observers, new osg::ObserverNodePath class for tracking NodePaths with thread safe access of NodePath.
- New OSG_NOTIFY macros that add a conditional check to avoid using of ostreams when the stream is to be ignored, this fixes a windows threading performance issue due to the poor Microsoft implementation of ostreams – the result is better and more consistent frame rates under windows when doing threading – such when using the DatabasePager.
- New Cmake variable OSG_NOTIFY_DISABLED that is OFF by default, but by setting it to ON you can disable all osg::notify/OSG_NOTIFY related messages. This enables the compilers to optimize away all OSG_NOTIFY usage as well as avoid messages being sent to the console. The notify message are very useful in application development so we’d recommend that you disable notify for performance testing or formal software releases.
- Improvement in efficiency and thread safety in the DatabasePager resulting in less frame drops, and fixes to occasional crashes that occurred when using many paging threads and rapid movements over databases.
- Fixes to TerraPage (.txp) plugin which address problems with memory consumption due to no longer used archives not being released.
- Improvements to Inventor plugin.
- Improvements to osgAnimation.
- Improvements to handling of precision in KdTree intersections which fix problems with missed intersection.
- Improvements to osgWidget::Input.
- Improvements to osgDB::XmlInput so that it handles a wider range of xml files.
- Improvements to audio syncing and pause support in the ffmpeg plugin.
- Lots of little compile and bug fixes.