Changes - History

Distribution licence keys may only be used to unlock the redistributable binaries in non-debug mode. To unlock the SDK in debug mode, a Development licence key is required.

Added support for particle effects (e.g. smoke, fire, dust) to the Scene framework. See ParticleBuffer, Example_FireEffect and Tutorial_31_Showcase for details.

Fixed a bug in ISimpleHttp.GetImage of SimpleHttp where the defaultSrgb parameter could get interpreted incorrectly.

Fixed rendering of ICanvasFactory.Bounds in CanvasWidget (green rectangle) after setting Factory to a different object.

The ITextureFactory.CreateTexture2DStatic method now also scales the given TexelBuffer objects to the supported texture size, in addition to converting them to the supported texture format, instead of throwing a RenderException.

Added new render target formats and changed the naming scheme to become more compact.

Decoupled GPU render target buffers when using IGraphicsContext.CreateRenderTarget, to allow more flexible usage scenarios:

Added order-independent transparency to the GPU rendering layer. See the new IRenderStage API for details.

The ImageDecal class now supports image content tiling, which allows image data to be used that is larger than the supported maximum texture size and increases parallelism of loading large images.

Added a deterministic refinement mode to the MeshBuffer class, for example to be used during offline processing or in distributed rendering environments, see MeshBuffer.CycleLimit and TerrainBufferFlags.Deterministic.

Fixed a panic in MeshBuffer.MeshUpdate that could happen after removing a mesh right after its creation, before it would become ready.

Simplified TerrainBufferFlags and exposed them to SceneOptions.

Dropped obsolete per-vertex tangent vectors for terrain meshes: terrain texturing uses terrain-space instead of tangent-space, terrain materials use tri-planar mapping.

WidgetBounds.FullScreen now always puts the widget onto the whole screen and ignores the user-interface screen regions (see INonUserInterfaceBounds). Use WidgetBounds.ClientArea to get the old behaviour.

Changed default value of EnvironmentMapSky.GroundColorDark. Use #111111 to get the old appearance.

Replaced the ModelRenderer.Wireframe property with the model renderer flag ModelRendererFlags.Wireframe.

Improved quality and robustness of per-vertex ambient occlusion terms (see Semantic.Horizon) and shadow-mapping (see ShadowMapping).

The new ModelRendererFlags.PixelFrequency flag may be used to improve performance in cases where the quality improvement of running pixel shaders at sample frequency is negligible. For example, Tutorial_22_Game uses on-the-fly planting of instanced geometry, which is rendered at pixel frequency, because the quality difference to sample frequency is not noticeable while the drop in performance is significant.

Fixed a problem with inconsistent input event processing of WidgetApplication when IApplicationWindow.MouseCaptured is used.

Added missing CODEX_TYPE_METADATA_BASE directives for types derived from the system types IEquatable, IComparable, IEnumerable and IEnumerator, to make CodeX::cast, CodeX::castSafe and CodeX::instanceOf work as expected.

Fixed undefined semantic of IBagConst.ContainsAll when both collections are empty.

Moved input state processing of WidgetApplication out of RenderPrepare, to fix problems related to lingering and/or lost input events when the application loop performs no rendering.

The DirectX12Context class now splits large GPU uploads (for example huge textures or vertex buffers), instead of failing.

The ModelRenderer class now uses bicubic interpolation on the GPU to produce high-quality specular reflections.

Finished IRenderTarget.Finish of DirectX12Context for RenderTargetFormat.Mipmaps.

Added support for high-dynamic range environment maps, see EnvironmentMapImage.HdrAutomatic and ImageFormat.HDR.

The range of actual raw pixel values in an image may now be queried with IImageInfo.Values and computed with ReadImageFlags.Range, if necessary.

Added support for tiled images to ImageFormat.TIFF.

Fixed a bug when using RenderTargetFormat.Mipmap with DirectX11Context that prevented mipmap levels from being computed correctly.

Fixed a bug in ImageFormat.TIFF that prevented images with planar configuration to be loaded correctly.

Fixed a bug that caused gamma-correction to be applied to alpha values in GdalImageFormat, ImageFormat.BMP and ImageFormat.TIFF.

The ModelRenderer class now uses the formulae of the glTF 2.0 specification and the associated reference implementation for rendering, using the new material properties of the IMaterial interface.

Changed error handling of DirectX12Context: instead of panicking, the RenderPipeline now goes into failure mode and silently drops all subsequent rendering. Error details are output as log messages and the next call to IGraphicsContext.Validate will then return false.

Replaced the ModelFlags.Lighting flag with the ModelPartFlags.NoLighting flag. Building 3D models by using the Model class will now create lit geometry by default, the new flag may specified explicitly to create unlit geometry.

ModelFormat.GLB (read)

ModelFormat.GLTF (read)

Native Libraries (Used By table columns)

Added a debug helper to the MG class for enabling system messages of the OpenFlight API, for testing and debugging.

Fixed some byte alignment issues when using non-power-of-two textures that have a block-based format (for example BC1) with DX9 / DX11 / DX12, which caused incorrect rendering of whole textures or single mipmap levels.

Fixed several bugs in ModelWidget regarding camera control problems, level-of-detail rendering not working properly for the shadow pass and clamping of the visible depth range.

Fixed several bugs in the implementations of IBufferCodec.BufferEncode that caused false-positive assertion failures regarding texture block size misalignment and possible buffer overflows when passing in byte buffers with a capacity of 22 bytes or less.

Fixed handling of instance and reference nodes in OpenFlightModelReader when reading 3D models in the FLT format.

Fixed a bug in IModel.Simplify that mingled child transformations when ModelSimplifyFlags.RemoveEmptyChildren or ModelSimplifyFlags.SortChildren was used.

Dirty state processing of built-in SceneObject subclasses now correctly triggers rendering of new frames by returning true from UpdateFrameTime.

Fixed a bug in Mat3D.Orthogonalize and Mat3F.Orthogonalize which resulted in non-orthogonal output basis vectors if the input basis vectors are nearly co-linear.

Texturing.Progress now returns 100 instead of 0 when no terrain sectors have been processed, for example when all terrain parts are culled away while looking straight up.

Changed default unit of UnitOfMeasureType.Angle from UnitOfMeasure.Radian to UnitOfMeasure.Degree and introduced default values to scripting fields of CoordSys (and related types), in order to avoid output of redundant script code. This change affects the following API:

Simplified factory methods of ColorRamp and rasterization helpers of PixelPyramidShape.

Changed JSON grammar to no longer allow control characters (0x00..0x1F) to be present in string literals, for compliance with the official JSON specification. Trying to parse such an invalid value now correctly throws a ValidatingException.

IMapShapes.ShapeAdd and IMapShapes.ShapePrepare no longer always transform the given IShape to the target coordinate system that is used by rasterization. Instead, the transform parameter may now be used to perform this transformation optionally.

Added surface levels to 3D models, to avoid Z-fighting of co-planar surfaces, see IModelPart.Layer.

Built-in file format / OpenFlightModelFormat (read)

Updated the documentation to better explain the interaction between ISceneEntity.CreateView, ISceneEntityView.Owner and ISceneView.ViewOf.

Added features for curves based on cubic splines (see Curve.Tangent) and associated shape factories, see Shape.Curve and RoadBuilder.

Shape rasterization via IMapShapes now supports on-the-fly projection, which will be performed automatically if the coordinate system of a IShape is not the same as the target coordinate system used by rasterization (for example, a global cubemap coordinate system).

Added support for localization of text labels in GUI components.

The ISceneView objects that are created by the Vehicle class via ISceneEntity.CreateView now return their respective owner via ISceneEntityView.Owner, instead of returning null, which made ISceneView.ViewOf return null and caused null-pointer errors when a Vehicle was removed from the scene.

Fixed equality comparison between IGeoObject objects after deserialization, where objects that had been equivalent before became non-equivalent afterwards.

Fixed rendering of FloatingLabel tick lines that broke with § 85.

Fixed handling of distance field offsets for IShape objects that use a geographic coordinate system by correcting the scale factor that is used by CoordinateSystemTransform.TransformScale, affecting the following API:

Eliminated the possibility of object self-destruction during the execution of constructors of classes derived from CodeX::Object (C++), caused by smart pointers that acquire and release the this pointer. Constructors may now use the new CODEX_CONSTRUCTOR macro to prevent this. Before this fix, self-destruction had to be avoided by not wrapping this in smart pointers, which required special care when coding constructors.

Fixed bad handling of corrupted BlockStorage data by throwing an IOException (instead of panicking or crashing) which indicates the location of corrupted file, for example:
Invalid 'BST' file: <path/to/corrupted/file>

Fixed a null-pointer error in the implementation of the ISceneObject.QueryRay method by the SceneEntity class, which occured when the list of TerrainModel objects (see ITerrainEntityContainer) is empty. As a work-around, add an empty TerrainModel object:
sceneView.TerrainModelAdd(new TerrainModel());

Fixed a bug in GPU synchronization with multiple ISceneView objects which caused occasional flickering, because GpuUpdateFlag.NoOverwrite was used to update data still being in use by rendering.

Fixed a sporadic GPU crash after resetting / switching the graphics context because of uninitialized data being used by TriangleMode.TriangleTerminal or TriangleMode.SectorList, which triggered Timeout detection and recovery (TDR).

Improved performance of when using TriangleMode.SectorList for terrain triangulation on the GPU.

Fixed terrain mesh refinement for problematic data (e.g. spikes, near-vertical slopes, displacement with wrinkles), which produced high amounts of unnecessary triangles, thus slowing down overall performance.

Moved some helper methods from ISceneView3D to IScene, please use ISceneView.Scene to access them, if necessary.

Fixed calls to SceneObject.QueryScreenLabelResult² that were passing null as the label parameter, causing possible null-pointer errors in FloatingLabel and ScreenGizmo.

Repackaged the Tinman.AddOns library components so that a separate library is only used when 3rd-party dependencies exist at build-time (dependencies still exist at run-time).

Fixed a bug in Path.Copy that sporadically caused IOError.SharingViolation errors due to a lingering IFile object for the source of the file copy operation.

Fixed a bug that could cause an array out-of-bounds error when decoding TriangleMode.SectorList primitives on the CPU and could make the GPU crash when using TerrainFeatureLevel.DX11 or higher.

The IScene.Transform method family now takes VerticalType.Height as default parameter value instead of VerticalType.HeightMesh, because its primary purpose is to place static objects in the scene.

The CodeX::String::Trim (C++) method no longer uses isspace resp. iswspace to check for whitespaces. Instead, the logic of FormattingUtil.IsWhitespace is used. The same logic is used by System.String.Trim (C#).

Fixed a null-pointer error in ScreenLabelPlacement when calling Clear without having initialized Size first.

Fixed a bug that sometimes caused a DirectX9RenderTarget to not update its content properly when IRenderTarget.Finish is called.

Fixed a spurious panic in MeshBuffer and a possible mesh refinement freeze that became apparent with § 75.

Greatly improved performance of IHeightmap.GetSample, especially when being used repeatedly on heightmaps that have a complex aggregation structure, as it is often the case in the Scene API where Geocentric.ToVerticalOffset is used a lot, for example by GeoPathTrack entities.

Fixed a sporadic bug in MeshBuffer that could make the Refinement Thread think that a vertex may be re-used, although it is still visible to the application in the Shadow Buffer.

The Aircraft class has been refactored into the Vehicle class, which provides additional helpers and examples for moving ground vehicles around while aligning them to the terrain slope.

Added helpers to the Scene API for placing objects on the ground, while aligning them with the terrain slope by computing pitch and roll angles automatically, see GroundPathTransform, YawPitchRollTransform and IScene.Transform.

Fixed a grammar bug in ConfigScript which made it impossible to declare an array of qualified identifiers:
variableName = [ ScriptName::memberName ] ;

Fixed a number of minor issues in the ConfigScript API that prevented qualified identifiers to be resolved properly, when referring to members of other scripts in the domain.

Added callbacks for dynamic DPI changes at runtime, so that applications may adjust rendering, for example by choosing appropriate font and image sizes: IApplicationWindow.Resolution, IApplication.WindowResolution, IGraphicsComponent.GraphicsResolution

Fixed a bug in the high-DPI handling code of ApplicationControlWpf in the Tinman.AddOns.WPF component, which caused the render canvas to be sized incorrectly and the mouse cursor position to be interpreted wrongly.

Platform-specific limits for file and directory path lengths are now taken into account by IFileSystem.PathValidate of LocalFileSystem.

Fixed stack-overflow error when outputting extremely long messages with LogMessageFormat.Default.

The C# assemblies of Tinman 3D SDK are now available on NuGet.

ModelRenderer now uses AffineTransform instead of Mat4D, which reduces the number of required arithmetic operations during model traversal and eliminates redundant conversions.

AffineTransform now uses separate methods for forward and reverse transformations, instead of a single combined one with an inverse parameter, which favors more aggressive optimization by compilers.

The Visual Studio solutions in the Tinman 3D SDK package now use the 2022 version. C++ code may be compiled with the 2022, 2019, 2017 or 2015 toolset. C# code may target Mono 6+, .NET Framework 4.8, .NET Core 3.1 or .NET 6.0+. Out-of-support versions or legacy toolsets may still be used (for example .NET 5.0), by adjusting the project files.

Fixed a bug in GeoPathConverter that did not read the input vertical coordinate correctly if it was different to GeoPathValue.Ellipsoid.

Various performance improvements and minor fixes regarding use of numerous scene objects (> 10.000) with the Scene API.

TerrainView.TextureProgress now returns 100 instead of 0 if the terrain does not have any texture layers.

Various performance optimization regarding memory consumption and runtime efficiency:

Fixed the signed distance field of shapes that have shared polygon contour edges, which may result from using the ReadShapeFlags.HintMergePolygons flag.

Fixed trimming of the common whitespace prefix from all text lines in a TextBlockNode when there are one or more empty text lines.

The difference between state handling of terrain objects in the High-level Terrain API and scene objects in the Scene API is now explained in Scene Overview / State Handling and exposed to code by the ITerrainEntityContainer interface.

IShapeReader and Shape.File now support filtering and modification while reading shape data.

Shapes may now carry JSON metadata and custom per-vertex shape values.

Introduced IJsonValue interface, so that immutable JSON values may be passed around safely.

ShapeFormat.CSH now uses delta encoding to reduce file sizes by ~30%. New .csh files can no longer be read with old SDK versions, but old .csh files may still be read with new SDK versions.

ShapeFormat.SHP no longer requires that the *.shx index file exists and can read shape data solely from a single *.shp file.

Extracted GUI code from tutorials and moved them to sub-namespaces, according to their target API (e.g. low-level / high-level terrain API, scene API).

Revised ISceneQuery API, to allow re-use of scene query objects and to increase flexibility via aggregated query operations.

Optimized interpolation code in GeoPath, which increases performance by a factor of ~300%.

ModelReader now computes per-face normal vectors when a model does not contain normal vector data. Computation of smooth per-vertex normal vectors may be enabled with ReadModelFlags.SmoothNormals.

ModelFormat.OBJ now supports materials via .mtl files.

ModelFormat.OBJ and ModelFormat.LAS now correctly apply ModelReader.RootUnit.

Fixed longitude wrap-around distortion in IPixelPyramid.Unproject.

Added default color-space handling to ISimpleHttp.GetImage and HttpPyramid, to disambiguate cases when sRGB image data is returned without color-space information. For example, BingMaps sometimes returns PNG files that contain sRGB image data but do not include a GAMA or SRGB chunk.

The PixelFontBuilder class has been improved to provide better control over the font building process and now uses a slightly modified pixel font image format. Please rebuild your custom pixel font files once, to migrate to the new format.

Fixed rendering of opaque 3D lines with Direct3D 9 which broke with § 32.

Refactored C# project files (*.csproj) to SDK-style and performed minor code fixes to compile and run on .NET Framework, Mono and .NET 5+ / .NET Core.

The Decaling class has been improved to eliminate inaccurate mapping of decal textures, which happened at cubemap edges / corners and when large geo-referenced image overlays were used.

Changed semantic of decal textures in Low-level Terrain API: decal vertex coordinates must now be specified in a given coordinate system, it is no longer possible to use heightmap coordinates directly. See IDecal for details.

Fixed some numeric precision issues in ICoordinateTransform implementations to comply to to the Geospatial Integrity of Geoscience Software (GIGS) Test Dataset v2.1.

Fixed numeric overflow bug in LatLon.FromSexagesimal and updated epsg-9.9.1.dat accordingly. IGeoRegistry.Name returns "EPSG 9.9.1 / Tinman 1.0 / Rev.1" for the fixed version.

Changed semantic of CoordinateSystem.CreateCoordinateTransform to throw a GeorefException when CoordinateSystem.IsLocal returns true.

Changed semantic of Dome.Subdivision to allow direct control of the coefficients that are passed to ModelGeometry.Sphere and ModelGeometry.SphereIco.

The texture addressing mode in the DirectX9Effect subclass for decaling was incorrectly set to TADDRESS_CLAMP and has been fixed to TADDRESS_BORDER with transparent black as border color.

ModelRenderer.LineThickness and TerrainModel.LineThickness have been removed. Please use Material.LineThickness and IModelGeometrySimple.ToModel instead.

Geocentric.Vertical no longer assumes that the given heightmaps are cubemaps and use the same geographic coordinate system as the Geocentric object.

The value of TextureDecal.Offset is now added to the vertex coordinates of the decal texture (after scaling and rotation), instead of subtracting it.

Scene.UpdateFrameTime no longer calls SceneView.UpdateFrameTime. See Scene and SceneView for details on the new update behaviour.

Changed semantic of automatic calls to MeshBuffer.MeshUpdate, which makes TerrainViewFlags.MeshUpdate obsolete. See TerrainView for details.

In the logging framework, renamed LogSeverity to LogVerbosity.

Enabled of TextureLayer now toggles the visibility of the underlying TerrainLayer.

MBTilesPyramid now applies the geographic bounds, if present in metadata table, to avoid that out-of-bounds data appears on the terrain.

SceneEntityBase.SceneAttach no longer calls UpdateState before returning, so that subclasses do not have to deal with incomplete initialization in their DoUpdateState overrides.

Modifying the GeoPathTrail.ColorFill / GeoPathTrail.ColorLine properties now correctly triggers an update to the 3D model.

The render order of terrain decals can now be configured per terrain layer, see: TerrainDecal.SortIndex, ImageDecal.SortIndex, TextureDecal.SortIndex.

DirectX9Context.SetGeometryBuffer now sets up non-instanced geometry explicitly:
IDirect3DDevice9::SetStreamSourceFreq(0, 1) IDirect3DDevice9::SetStreamSourceFreq(1, 1)
Instead of using an instance count of 1 (n = number of instances):
IDirect3DDevice9::SetStreamSourceFreq(0, n | D3DSTREAMSOURCE_INDEXEDDATA)
IDirect3DDevice9::SetStreamSourceFreq(1, 1 | D3DSTREAMSOURCE_INSTANCEDATA)
These variants should be equivalent. In some specific cases, the second variant does not work.

Fixed endless loop in Path.MakeRelative when passing Path.Unknown.

IGraphicsContext.ClearRenderTarget is no longer allowed to fail silently when invalid clear flags are passed. Instead, the clear is performed using the valid subset of the given flags.

Added warning log messages for failed non-critical render API calls (DirectX9, DirectX11).

Added the possibility for case-insensitive comparisons in various methods of the Path class and the related API.

Exposed the set of invalid characters for path elements via IFileSystem.InvalidCharacters.

Added NATVIS files to make C++ debugging easier.

Moved unit testing API (C#) into separate library.

Now using C++ noexcept for non-throwing methods, in order to allow more aggressive code optimization.

No longer using the WinAPI WaitForSingleObject function.

Fixed some numerical bugs in map projection code.

Updated EPSG geodata registry to version 9.9.1.

Fixed the algorithm that orders #include directives in the C++ source code, to reduce the number of code changes for future updates.

Unified DisposeManaged / DisposeUnmanaged of Disposable into DisposeResources.

Removed obsolete hooks for disposal at shutdown.

Tinman shutdown now frees all resources and reverts to the initial state.

Tinman can now be used again after shutdown.

Fixed a bug when loading non-power-of-two DDS textures.

Now using local NuGet cache for packages, please run "Restore NuGet packages" once.

AddOns for Direct3D 9 no longer use the D3DX Effects API, source code has been dropped.

Now performing additional thread-synchronization in Disposable class. There were reports of spurious sharing violation problems on dataset files when being used concurrently.