This is a major release with significant changes. Please review the
changes when upgrading. The list below is by no means exhaustive, but
should contain the most important changes.
General
* Experimental ability to build for Android
* New input framework to natively support gamepads, joysticks, etc.
* Multi-threaded render pipeline is a lot more stable now
* New setuptools-based deployment pipeline
* Improvements to mouselook smoothness
* Cache is now at `$XDG_CACHE_HOME/panda3d` (`~/.cache/panda3d`), not `~/.panda3d`
* Addition of unit test suite
* Many improvements to thread safety
* Many performance improvements
* Tons of bugfixes
* Big style cleanup of C++ source code
Python API
* Complete support for Python 3
* Support for coroutines and async/await
* Property interfaces have been added for many settings
* More flexible handling for keyboard arguments in C++ APIs
* Python bindings are completely separated out of the C++ libraries.
* Interrogate binding generator has many improvements.
* Use of pandac.PandaModules is discouraged, use panda3d.core et al
* Use of libRocket is discouraged due to lack of Python 3 support
* Tasks are now sorted in addition order when lacking a sort value
* Fixes iris/fade transitions for extreme aspect ratios
* WeakNodePath is now exposed to Python
* `WindowProperties.size(x, y)` deprecated; use `WindowProperties(size=(x, y))`
* Calling bare `run()` is deprecated, use base.run() instead
* `downcastTo*()` methods have been removed, they were already no-ops
Rendering
* Add new shader-based terrain rendering method (ShaderTerrainMesh)
* The default ColorAttrib mode is now `T_vertex`
* The ColorAttrib `T_off` mode now properly disables vertex colors entirely
* Make handling of color attributes more consistent between renderers
* Ability to create an OpenGL core profile context; set `gl-version 3 2`
* Experimental support for reverse-Z rendering for best depth precision
* sRGB framebuffers supported more widely
* Support for infinite near/far clip in lens
* Add some PBR material parameters to material class
* Addition of more built-in GLSL shader inputs; see manual.
* Add `p3d_FragData[]` GLSL output for MRT in GLSL 1.30
* Add flag enabling vertex shader control over point size
* Support signed ints and double-precision floats in vertex data with GLSL
* Support unsigned 11/10/10-bit floating-point textures and vertex data
* Support for SSBOs via ShaderBuffer class
* Support OpenGL FBO buffers without any attachments
* Support passing uint variables to GLSL shader
* Allow rendering objects with empty vertex data (for vertex pulling)
* Add LogicOpAttrib, for supporting logical operator blending
* Improvements to OpenGL ES support
* Support for geometry with adjacency information
* Change default alpha blending to improve blending rendered result
* New method for obtaining native OpenGL texture object
* Support windowless offscreen rendering on macOS
* Panda resets OpenGL state better before and after draw callbacks
* OpenGL renderer better supports debugging tools like apitrace
* Support fixed-depth billboards, useful for 2D tags that don't change size
Shader generator
* Significant performance improvements
* Support for point light shadows
* Hardware skinning support
* Changes to match fixed-function pipeline better
* Fixes for normal vector normalization
* Support multiple normal maps (uses Reoriented Normal Mapping)
* Tracks modifications to materials and texture stages automatically
Lighting
* Allow specifying light color based on color temperature
* Setting specular color of a light separately is deprecated
* New GLSL inputs to make implementing lighting in shaders much easier
* Add representation for sphere light and rectangle light
* Efficiency improvements for passing light information to shader
* Interocular distance for shadow cameras now always defaults to 0
* Add low-level lighting module from RenderPipeline
Textures
* Support cube map arrays
* Support buffer textures
* Many more texture formats supported
* BC4 and BC5 compression modes supported
* Proper depth textures supported in DirectX 9 renderer
* `set_ram_image(_as)` directly supports buffer protocol
* TexturePeeker supports more formats and component types
Text
* Dramatic improvements to text rendering performance
* Support for HarfBuzz for higher-quality text shaping and kerning
* Support for right-to-left text
* Support for signed-distance-field rendering in egg-mkfont
Audio / video
* The default unit for audio is now 1 meter for each Panda unit.
* Native .flac loader
* Support videos with alpha channel in ffmpeg
* OpenAL stability improvements, especially on macOS
* Support loading .opus files with libopusfile
* Fix various memory leaks
Physics / collisions
* CollisionTube is renamed to CollisionCapsule.
* Box-box collision test is improved to work well with the Pusher
* More box tests for collision system: box-into-plane, box-into-poly
* Capsule (tube) can be used as "from" shape into plane, sphere, capsule, box
* Bullet objects are serializable to .bam files.
* Bullet bindings are now thread safe.
* Bullet debug drawer is more efficient; no longer inherits GeomNode.
* Various fixes to bullet vehicle wheel synchronization
* PhysX bindings are deprecated.
Pipeline / loading
* Support for Assimp library to load a broad variety of model formats
* Ability to specify min-lod, max-lod, lod-bias in .egg file
* Egg file materials support PBR-style material parameterization
* Support loading more DDS files, including DX10-style ones
* Add support for OpenEXR and HDR textures
* Support line/point thickness in bam2egg
* bam2egg no longer inserts a vestigial ModelNode at the top
* bam2egg supports depth test, offset, cull bin attributes
* Accept a .gz file wherever a .pz file is accepted
* egg-palettize supports mirror and border-color wrap modes
* More robust checks against memory corruptions when loading bad .bam files
* Support for Maya 2017 and 2018
* Support preprocessing GLSL shaders created with Shader.make
Build
* We now require using MSVC 2015 or 2017 to compile on Windows.
* At least GCC 4.8 is now required.
* With GCC/clang, enabling C++11 is now required.
* Allow building with more recent ffmpeg versions
* Support for old FFMpeg versions (before 1.1) dropped.
* The ppremake build system has been removed.
* Support for OpenSSL versions before 0.9.7 has been dropped.
C++
* Use of `NULL` is replaced with `nullptr`
* WeakPointerTo now requires use of `lock()` method for thread safety
* Mutex et al now satisfy C++11 Lockable constraints
* Panda headers no longer contain `using namespace std;`
* `PN_int32` et al have been removed, use `stdint.h` types instead
* The need to link with pystub and add Python include dirs is removed.