Yes, it's here! After months of development, weeks of secret testing to weed out the worst bugs, and an hour of unexpected server downtime - here is Phun beta 5!

We're releasing it here on the forums first so that you, our most active users, can get your hands on it first. We'll put it up on the main download page and send out a mail to the mailing list next week.

This release is called "Algodoo Phun edition". Algodoo is a commercial product based on Phun which will be released in April, and will contain even more new cool features. Stay tuned!

EDIT: I've updated Phun to 5.28, avilable at the download page. Full changelog for 5.26, 5.27 and 5.28 at the end of this post.


Full changelog:

Rendering:
* Added support for textured geometries
* Added new optional rendering mode for water: software meta surface.

Scene files:
* New file format: .phz which is a zip containing the scene, a thumbnail and any used textures.
* Velocities for objects and water particles is now saved to the scene files.
* Water and groups can now be saved in phunlets

Tools:
* New brush tool
* New gear tool
* New cut tool
* Polygon tool: self-intersecting polygons are now handled (e.g. figure-of-eight:s)
* Added the ability to choose the chain building blocks (right-click a group of objects with exactly two hinges attached to the world)
* When reconnecting a chain to the first geometry in the chain, the chaintool will now create a perfect closed chain with no hinges to the background
* New behavior: to move or drag something, first select it and then drag it with most any tool.
* Hinge/fixjoint/spring now attaches to selected geometries first (used to always attach the top two entities)
* Added the ability to throw things with the move-tool
* Added 'snap to axis' functionality when holding down SHIFT for Move and Clone tool.

UI:
* Added three levels to the user interface: Simple, Medium and Advanced
* Made the camera move smoothly
* Added the ability to rotate the camera with an object (reset rotation with "Zoom to scene" or "Default view")
* Made Phun more touch-screen friendly (especially when "pen input" is selected)
* Added the ability to add text onto boxes
* Pens no longer draw anything when moved in paused mode.
* Added the ability to select water and move it around, clone it etc.
* Added extra cursor icon to indicate which tool is selected
* Added support for non-Latin1 8-bit character sets (you'll need to create a new font file and set Font in the translation file).
* Added a loading screen
* Added a splashscreen
* Changed how a hinge is drawn if it is a motor
* Added support for pen tablets (including pressure sensitivity when using new brush tool)
* Mouse-over object highlighting is now only active if the simulation is paused.
* Fixed so that Phun binds ctrl over left_ctrl and right_ctrl (same for alt, shift and meta) in hinge/geom controllers and Keys.bind.
* Changed mirror/kill/motor key behavior to only work when the simulation is running
* When rotating objects or creating planes you will now get automatic 15° snapping when the cursor is close to the origin.
* Added the ability to drag-and-drop images and scenes into Phun from explorer (Windows only)

Menus:
* Went back to the old GUI with rounder and larger components
* The context menu is now always open instead of poping up on right-click
* Sliders now round to closest integer or other "simple" number
* Added a few predefined materials (and you can create your own if you like - see the "materials" folder)
* Dragging the clone button now creates a clone of the selected objects
* Added "select alike" button, that selects identical objects (good for finding clones)
* Added sliders for gravity strength and direction in options
* Added a button to the menu bar to hide all other gui components.
* Added the ability to automatically attach tracers to selected geometries
* Added option "gearify" to add gears to an object (cog sizes decided in the gear tool options)
* Added "transform into box" action alongside the old "transform into circle".
* Added a layer filter menu - now specific collision layers can be filtered out from rendering and interaction
* Changed the color picking sliders from HSL to HSV. Change back by setting "App.GUI.useHSL = true;" in either console or config.cfg
* Added Sim.time to the simulation info box
* Reorganized the user interface a lot
* Added cvar GUI.tooltips so the user can disable tooltips.

Physics:
* Added support for holy polygons (polygons with holes)
* Added Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) - select one of two intersecting objects and in the CSG menu select Cut, Intersect, Subtract or Add.
* Added the ability to create "killer" geometries, that removes anything they touch from the simulation.
* Replaced Scene.fallLimit with four "killer planes" that removes anything they touch from the simulation. These can be deleted if desired.
* Added the ability to link the rotation of an object to the direction of gravity
* Increased the number of collision groups to seven.

Physics engine:
* Added attraction: a distance dependent forces between geometries in the same collision group
* Added the concept of cables - transparent code that makes chains far more robust than before even under large stress. See the old behavior with "Sim.cables = false;"
* Greatly improved the stability of towers/stacking
* Fixed an energy- and momentum leak caused by interaction between forces (springs, gravity, ...) and constraints (hinges, contacts).

Scripting:
* Added a scripting menu in advanced mode where object attributes can be set.
* Added onCollide function to geometries - this is a function that is called when two objects collide. It has an event argument e with members e.pos, e.normal, e.other and e.this.
* Added closure "Scene.my" that can contain user defined scene specific variables that will be serialized with the scene.
* Added two Thyme-meta-functions: Reflection.ExecuteCode and Reflection.ExecuteFile
* Added command Scene.Open which opens a scene given a filename.
* Added command Scene.SaveAs which saves the current scene to a given file. WARNING: Will overwrite any existing file without asking!
* Thyme is now Turing complete through an if-else-clause of the form: (foo ? bar : baz)
* Improved the Thyme parser to be able to handle chained infix operators (e.g. "4/2*2") without extra parentheses.
* Thyme is now case insensitive
* Added Thyme support for hexadecimal and binary numbers (0xf0a1, 0b101011)
* Added Thyme support for the operators == and != for lists.

Fixes:
* Fixed text input of characters with Alt Gr, i.e. []{}" etc depending on keyboard layout
* Changed screenshot format from tga to png.
* Fixed a problem with drawing mouse-cursors when in fullscreen mode.
* Fixed a problem where thin polygons would get really fouled up distance maps
* Fixed copy-and-paste of text and phunlets
* Removed the cmd window in Windows
* A lot more fixes and tweaks that I've forgotten

Optimization:
* Speeded up mirror and uniform-axes scaling of polygons while also saving memory
* General speedups, especially for large scenes
* Added (very) limited support for multicore; type in "Threading.numThreads = N" (no quotations) in your console or config.cfg, where N is your number of cores. May speed up really huge scenes slightly, but may also slow it down.

Translations:
* Japanese translation by tatt61880
* Brazilian Portuguese translation by xxGLHRMxx
* Russian translation by Kilinich
* English and Swedish by emilk

EDIT:

=== Beta 5.26, 2009-03-24 ===
* Fixed a bug that prevented textures from being loaded correctly from .phz files
* Fixed a problem where an aborted chain would not be undoable
* Fixed a problem where scaling an object would close any widgets related to it (like the color menu)
* Fixed a bug where deleting an object while scaling it would crash Phun
* Fixed a bug where pressing delete/backspace while cloning would always delete the original
* Fixed a bug that caused submenus and popups to be closed when dragging a slider with an object behind it.
* Fixed a bug that would cause some sliders to erroneously go to zero instead of infinity
* Fixed a bug that would cause Phun to crash when editing the box text of several boxes at the same time
* Fixed a problem with holding down SHIFT before moving or rotating an object
* Fixed a bug where redo could create invisible objects
* Made it simpler to move, rotate and scale objects tracked by camera
* Added Math.and (&&) and Math.or (||) to Thyme
* Renamed "Color menu" to the more accurate "Appearance"
* Added the ability to script length, damping and strength of a spring
* Added german translation by KaLul

Also, beta 5.26 should now work on Mac OS 10.4 and later for both x86 and PowerPC


=== Beta 5.27, 2009-03-30 ===
* Changed the look of the fixjoint to reflect what it is connected to
* Changed autosave time from every 30 seconds to every 5 minutes.
* Added a checkbox in options to turn autosave off
* Changed cloning behavior to clone attributes with any scripts intact
* Fixed a bad bug concerning "Transform into box" and other geometry actions.
* Fixed a problem where Phun would fail to find textures in .phz
* Fixed a bug that would incorrectly group together objects
* Fixed some problems regarding moving or cloning joints (springs, hinges, fixates)
* Added serialization of "Draw Hinges/Fixes when running" options to scene file
* May have fixed a problem with serialization of spring lengths
* Optimized rendering slightly
* Changed layer filter to completely hide objects from view
* Added serialization of layer filter to scene
* Tracers now gets erased when moved to the background
* Turned off alpha channel in screenshots. Turn on again with "App.screenshotsWithAlpha=true"
* Changed "Attach tracers" feature to scale tracers with geometry size instead of camera zoom
* Fixed better contrast colors when having a white or very bright background color.
* Readded the descriptive text of widgets (e.g. "Geometry actions for 2 polygons")
* Added "show group" button to widgets
* Added Dutch translation by Mike-RaWare


=== Beta 5.28, 2009-03-31 ===
* Added immortality - geometries that are immune against killers.
* Made the default killer planes immortal so that falling killers won't remove the killer planes.
* Fixed a bug introduced in 5.27 that stacked widget descriptions (e.g. "Appearance for 2 circles for 2 circles")
* Fixed a bug that caused widgets to not be serialized at all.
* Fixed yet another bug where objects would incorrectly be grouped together
* Fixed a problem where ungrouping (Ctrl-U) would close widgets
* Removed extra "..." from translations
* Added Polish translation by Pitros


There you go! Hope you enjoy it!

Last edited by emilk (2009-03-31 08:28:03)