2021 mark the first official public release so next few revisions will be focusing more and making things rock solid, more consistent and improving existing functionalities than adding new "big features". This year will also focus on creating more tutorials, improving the documentation and to create more learning materials; all for the sake of creating a smoother learning curve.

Art have been busy also, planning for a new demo (spoiler alert: which will maybe be turned into a game later); screenshots are coming in soon...

The next revision is planned for the end of this summer... In the meantime a new series of tutorials are coming in entitled "How To". The goal of theses tutorials is to create quick videos that shed light on some features and functionalities to get you started more quickly.

I've created a new "playground" for this new video series; It implement a slightly different renderer than the NRGshowroom; since (as you can see from the screenshots below, it is outdoor):

So far the list of fixes, updates and improvements are as follow:

- Fix EXR and HDR format loading.

- Added 32bits float depth attachment.

- Cubemap Static Dialog can now create blank Cubemaps.

- New OffsetDirection Constraint; use the direction of on Object to offset based on a specific distance.

- Improved KTX compatibility and consistency.

- ThemeImageLoad and ThemeImageInfo cleanup and refactor.

- Ability to now let the user set the projection_matrix of a Camera or Probe manually.

- Camera Orthographic now have various presets of the most common usage and the ability to setup the projection manually.

- SetConstraint & SetQuaternionConstraint now have the ability to select which axis will be affected.

- Added support for user based Shader uniform array.

- New FrameBuffer Attachment support for Texture2DArray and Texture3D.

- Various minor bugs fix and overall improvements.

The new attachments options are now available within the "New Attachment" dialog:

As a result the layer index can now be specified; in addition at the to right a new button have been added to force to recreate the framebuffer from scratch; and the ability to specify to discard a specific attachment content for mobile devices that are based on tile renderers.

The OffsetDirection constraint have been created especially for the NRGplayground.It allows to create cascaded shadow maps without having to manually set the Probe locations. Each probe capturing a slice of shadowmap pushed away from the main camera automatically using this new constraint; it is easier and more visual to tweak the distance and directly see the results.

In addition to that; to make things smoother, new locks have been added to the "Set" constraints. This now allows you to specify which axis you want to set or offset. Also created while adding cascaded shadowmaps to the sandbox, theses new locks are used by the Probes capturing the depth to place them at a specific height while being aligned to the main camera direction (see OffsetDirection). The screenshot below demonstrate the locks on the SetLocation constraint; but it also apply for all the "Set" series such as SetScale, SetRotation and SetQuaternion.