8.1
8.1
| Release date |
August 2022 |
| Developers | |
| New features | |
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| |
| Chronology | |
| Previous 8.0 |
Next 10.0 |
Purpose
Version 8.1 added Vulkan, Metal, D3D11, D3D12, for a fallback OpenGL and OpenGLES, hardware render.
This implied additional programmable shaders and 3D asset file formats.
Total rewrite of all renderables.
Features
New features include additional 3D formats and modern shader-only render, to be made available during the v8 cycle.
AW::Browser 1818
2021 December 28th
- Initial Release
- Replaced Microsoft's WinInet API
AW::Browser 1819
2021 December 29th
- Fixed an issue your own CAV eventually not showing, when initially entering a world.
AW::Browser 1820
2022 January 5th
- Copyright to 2022.
- Cleanup unused animation sequences during runtime.
- More concurrent and faster http(s) downloads from OP.
- Accordingly, more concurrent assets-items loaded.
- Unlock up to 1000fps.
AW::Browser 1821
2022 January 15th
- Keep the 3 last animation sequences in memory for each avatar.
- Ensure render to texture to none-multisampling surface.
AW::Browser 1822
2022 January 17th
- Replace Microsoft's DirectSound for sound and noise action commands.
AW::Browser 1823
2022 January 21th
- Reduce count of threads spawned by sound and noise playback.
- Play audio of media by the audio module built-in the VLC SDK.
- Upsample all audio to at least 48000 / second, 2 channels, 16 bit.
AW::Browser 1824
2022 January 25th
- Reimplement traditional software shadows for static models.
AW::Browser 1825
2022 February 2nd
- Run longer sound and noise audio in a separate engine.
- Gracefully close the application, even if user cancels the shutdown process (not when killed).
- Use common HOR+ FOV instead of previous VER- FOV.
AW::Browser 1826
2022 February 12th
- Fixed an issue with mouse focus detection on objects.
- Adjust HUD text render on D3D9, requiring accurate half-texel offset.
- Adjust avatar's auto-walk to high fps.
- Removed obsolete "Render balloons on top" in chat settings.
- Lit scene by up to 32 concurrent light sources.
AW::Browser 1827-1828
2022 February 14th/18th
- Latest VLC script for streaming YouTube.
- Fine tuning of light shaders.
- Flat and single-textured terrain is no longer optimized, as long as no hardware limits encountered, in an area up to 32 by 32 cells in order for light sources finding reflective surfaces.
- Light sources not affecting the current field of view are ignored.
- Number of light sources are no longer reduced on low-end graphics.
- Delay grid sector loading, only occurring in worlds bigger than P-100, in order to have physics finishing it's tasks to reduce drag when crossing world sector borders - a grid sector layout of 200 by 200 cells with its origin at 0n 0w.
AW::Browser 1829
2022 February 25th
- Increase potential terrain triangles taking traditional shadow render.
- SSE-matrix computations optimization.
AW::Browser 1830
2022 March 3rd
- Clamp total light intensity preventing over-lighting of existing/older scenes.
- Re-add support for pre-historic RWX files missing later attributes (i.e. DAAP, z-galaxy).
- Fixed an issue with the opacity action command eventually making an object invisible unintended.
- Increase minimum world visibility range to up to 400 meters in each direction.
AW::Browser 1831
2022 March 8th
- Re-enable dynamic color-changes and switch-off (color=0 or brightness=0) of individual spot- and point-light sources.
- Permit opacity command within a range of 0.02 to 1.0 unconditionally.
AW::Browser 1832
2022 April 11th
- CEF Update to 100.0.4896.75.
AW::Browser 1833-1834
2022 May 22nd
- General maintenance release.
- Fixed an issue when texture states might not be set correctly.
- Improved detection of failing downloads for external pictures, sounds, and midi.
- Last build available for 32-bit Windows.
AW::Browser 1835
2022 August 2nd
- Final release introducing modern shader render, last version using a Windows UI.
- Dropped D3D9 not capable of modern shader render.
- D3D11 feature level 11_0 as minimal hardware requirement.
- All major maths getting advantage of SSE / AVX and NEON / SIMD.
- All display / render driven by hardware accelerated shaders.
- Introduced Sub- and Super- Sampling.
- New Ambient Occlusion, Ocean Water and Shadow render.
- Up to 32 simultaneous light sources even for low-end devices.
- Sharing disk cache across all render backends; local disk cache upper limit increased from 10GB to 24GB.
- Multi-threading render.
- Framerates on dedicated graphic hardware doubled compared to previous D3D9-only build with Vulkan backend.
- Overall smoother experience, even on low-end devices with at least 4 cores.
AW::Browser 1836
2022 August 4th
- Drop workarounds for a particular historic 3rd-party CAV set constantly breaking CAV standards.