The main new feature is the OpenCL and DirectCompute hardware accelerated cloth simulation.
Thanks to Lee Howes from AMD for this contribution and thanks to NVIDIA for a Fermi GTX 470 GPU for compatibility testing!
We have done a lot of work to streamline OpenCL development for various platforms. We can debug OpenCL kernels using MiniCL, a simplified OpenCL replacement that compiles kernels using the regular C/C++ compiler. The demos can be compiled using OpenCL 1.0 and 1.1 using the most recent AMD and NVIDIA OpenCL SDKs for Windows and Linux as well as Mac OSX. A lot of work went into tweaking the CMakeLists.txt for the cmake build system so it works nicely with various OpenCL SDKs cross-platform. We also used a modified version of CMake to generate Visual Studio project files that we distribute, using relative paths and environment variables etc. The OpenCL kernels are embedded in the executable by default, but they can also be loaded from disk.
There is also a DirectCompute cloth implementation for Microsoft DirectX11. You can see Lee Howes presentation at MSDN here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/gclassy/ ... ed-Physics
- OpenCL & DX11 cloth simulation as part of BulletSoftBody. See Bullet/Demos/OpenCLClothDemo and Bullet/Demos/DX11ClothDemo. This is an initial implementation, and there is no support for collision detection or other advanced features yet.
- New btParallelConstraintSolver as part of BulletMultiThreaded. Although mainly targetting PlayStation 3 SPUs it also accelerates multi-core PCs. See Bullet/Demos/MultiThreadedDemo or get the spubullet-2.77 from PS3 Devnet.
- Many more bug fixes and minor features.
Some related news:
- We forked the 3ds Max plugin, replacing PhysX by Bullet. It is open source under the MIT license and it supports .bullet export. See http://dynamica.googlecode.com for source and precompiled versions.
- OgreKit is a new open source framework that makes very easy to develop using Bullet, Ogre, OpenAL and Lua. It directly reads Blender .blend files and works on Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and iPhone/iPad. See http://gamekit.googlecode.com
- Cinema 4D release 12 has improved support for Bullet, including constraints and their improved soft body implementation. Cinema 4D 12 also supports .bullet export. Download a free trial demo here: http://www.maxon.net
Erwin