Version 0.4.md

Version 0.4

New since 0.3.2

• GraphicsAPI is now singleton and is initialized with a GraphicsImplementation
  • Lots of interfaces no longer required a GraphicsAPI pointer
• Engine initialization path is now more clear
• Minor cleanup in ionMath
  • Changed a few method names
  • Add features to vec3 and box3
  • Remove unnecessary const
  • Added some new typedefs
• Fix crash when an OBJ file has no materials (merge from 0.3.2.1)
• CSceneManager, CGUIManager, other classes moved from ion::Scene:: to ion::
• Improvements to CUniform wrapper
  • arithmetic-assignment operators
  • move construction and assignment operators
• Add method to GraphicsAPI to create texture from image
• Add method to get GraphicsContext from Window
• Update tinyformat version to get rid of compiler warnings on OS X clang (merge from 0.3.2.2)

Upgrade Guide

Namespace Changes

A few classes moved out of the global namespace and into ion::, and a few others moved from ion::*:: to ion::

• ion::Scene::CSceneManager now ion::CSceneManager
• ion::Graphics::IGraphicsAPI now ion::CGraphicsAPI
• CWindowManager now in ion::
• CWindow now in ion::
• CTimeManager now in ion::
• CGUIManager now in ion::

New Initialization Path, GraphicsAPI is Singleton

The main change here is that IGraphicsAPI is now CGraphicsAPI, is singleton, and is no longer a parameter to a lot of methods. The initialization path has changed a little, but has overall been modified so that it is obvious what order to initialize each engine component.

Where in 0.3.2, initialization would look like this:

WindowManager->Init();
CWindow * Window = WindowManager->CreateWindow(...);
TimeManager->Init();

IGraphicsAPI * GraphicsAPI = new COpenGLAPI();
SceneManager->Init(GraphicsAPI);
AssetManager->Init(GraphicsAPI);

It now looks like this in 0.4:

GraphicsAPI->Init(new Graphics::COpenGLImplementation());
WindowManager->Init(GraphicsAPI);
TimeManager->Init(WindowManager);
SceneManager->Init(GraphicsAPI);
AssetManager->Init(GraphicsAPI);

Additionally, there are a handful of places where GraphicsAPI used to be a parameter for initialization but is no longer. Constructing a Scene::CRenderPass takes only a Graphics::IGraphicsContext:

CRenderPass * RenderPass = new CRenderPass(Context);

Most other changes should be transparent to user code.