[X3D-Public] Announcement: view3dscene 3.10.0

[Michalis Kamburelis]

Hi everyone,

New version of view3dscene, an open-source VRML/X3D browser developed
along with our game engine, is available on

  http://vrmlengine.sourceforge.net/view3dscene.php

The main focus of 3.10.0 release is a new "pure" shader rendering, where
everything 3D is rendered through correct GLSL shaders. This gives us
per-pixel lighting, where everything is just much more beautiful
(perfect specular highlights, spot light beams, radius and attenuation
applied per-pixel and so on). It also makes a large improvement for
shadow maps --- they are now applied in the correct place of the
lighting equation, and multiple shadow maps from multiple light sources
work correctly, and cooperate with all possible lights and textures
settings. Bump mapping is also much better now, affecting all normal X3D
lights.

This release also introduces new X3D extensions to composite GPU
shaders. They allow user to easily write custom shader effects that
cooperate with built-in renderer effects. This avoids common problem
with standard X3D shader component, where your shaders unconditionally
replace all normal features. In fact, these extensions were also very
useful internally, to implement "pure" shader rendering easily. More
information about this on
  http://vrmlengine.sourceforge.net/compositing_shaders.php

And some more new features: conversion of 3DS/Wavefront/Collada/etc to
X3D 3.2, light source "global" field correct support, LineProperties,
and many other improvements :) See the main page of our engine for
complete release notes with some eye-candy screenshots:

  http://vrmlengine.sourceforge.net/

Have fun,
Michalis