SDK 3.3 Release

Development
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First off: Sorry for the delay here, it’s almost a month, I don’t actively look into the hub anymore.

SDK Release 3.3

This release is long overdue, sorry for that.
The reason for holding back the release, however, is due to a lot of unresolved issues and bugs.
Due to Changes on the Engine Side and the fact that, regardless of the issues, this release brings a lot highly demanded and important features such as a Gradle Integration as well as partially working nightly updates and people still using 3.2 SDKs because of the stable label missing, we have decided to release this SDK as stable with the issues it has.

We will, however, state those issues very clearly, so everyone is supposed to be aware of them and can use the workarounds.

For an up-to-date overview, check out our 3.3 Milestone as well as the 3.3 Animation System Milestone.

The outstanding issues are:

  • Lacking support for the new Animation System (it should work, but it may crash and it certainly doesn’t have custom tailored new functions, instead it’s the old UI for the new System).

  • Mac OS: Running on OpenGL 2.1 instead of 3.2, due to engine issue #1336

  • Vehicle Editor: Due to incompatibilities with j3o/bullet the Vehicle Editor can cause SDK crashes. We’re working with a contributor to fix this, currently waiting for a new race track asset.

  • Re-Applying Changes with GLTF can cause the model to break. This is the feature that prompts you when changing the GLTF file, to update the buffers on the converted j3o file automatically. As a Workaround just press “no”, delete the j3o file and re-convert.

  • Missing Sources and Javadoc for ANT Libraries: The SDK used to ship “Modules” that could be easily used to add the Engine as dependency to your ANT build. This is broken due to issues with gradle (#283). This also affects the ability to create an Examples Project, it will be empty due to the SDK missing the sources there. Note that it is recommended to use a gradle project anyway to not be forced to use the Engine Version that the SDK ships, as those modules are likely to be removed in future versions anyway.

  • Update Center: We’ve tried to bring back the old nightly update repository soley being hosted on github using github actions and releases instead of a dedicated host. Along with this, we try to reduce the SDKs download size and make modules optional (ogre, android, …). Due to a lack of version numbering, it may always show you all modules as requiring an update and it may or may not show an update that is not even there. For now just either ignore the updates or, if you have the bandwidth and want to stay on master (maybe with a dedicated installation), just do the updates from time to time.

New Features

Besides support for the 3.3 Engine Version (most notably containing the new animation system), we’ve also bumped the Netbeans Version, added Gradle Support, improved PBR with prebuilt light probes and added a Behavior Tree Editor.
For a more complete feature log, please look at the Git Diff

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Thanks for all the work that went into this release!

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