Beta 2024.12.16.1304

Beta Beta 2024.12.16.1299 is a Resonite version released on 2024/12/16.

The following notes were sent by Frooxius:

PhotonDust, our new particle system and major milestone for the performance upgrade, is now part of the main build! It is still in "experimental" testing phase, because there are still issues to fix. However, since it's in a stable enough state to play and experiment with, we can continue testing on the main branch!

Currently it exists alongside the legacy particle system - I still recommend using the old one for stability until we remove the "experimental" label from PhotonDust. The goal is to have a more gradual transition to the new system, rather than an abrupt one, so for the time being, you can use both old and new particle systems!

Big thanks to everyone who helped test PhotonDust in the prerelease branch and find a number of issues so far: @Nuki Raccoon ♀, @epicEaston197, @Decoy, @orange, @Zozokasu, @RueShejn, @Modern, @Moonbase, @Nytra, @MirPASEC, @UltrawideGamer, @Lexevo, @Halo, @MysticJuniper, @HamoCorp, @Venport, @Foolish, @Aegis_Wolf, @qualia and anyone else I missed (I went over the release notes and issues, so sorry if you got missed! >///< - if you got a prerelease issue open that hasn't been addressed yet, you'll be credited as those get fixed up!)

If you'd like to help us polish PhotonDust, please give a read to the testing and reporting instructions first: https://github.com/Yellow-Dog-Man/Resonite-Issues/discussions/3276

I've also went over how PhotonDust works in a recent episode of The Resonance. If you'd like to learn more, watch here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnecM48lKnc

There's also some other goodies in this, @ProbablePrime has overhauled the cursor system, which fixes a bunch of sizing inconsistencies and exposes new options to configure cursor sizes! If you find the new defaults too big (or still too small), adjust them in your settings!

New Features:

• Implemented a new in-house modular particle system called PhotonDust (issue #587 - a major milestone of our performance updates)
  • IMPORTANT: This is currently in "experimental" state, as there are still issues to fix and polish. Be cautious about using it for new projects at this time (until the experimental label goes away)
  • Please play and experiment with it though to help us polish it up some more!
  • You can still use the Legacy Particle system until PhotonDust is polished for stability
  • Currently conversion of Legacy Particle systems to PhotonDust is opt-in - go Settings -> Misc -> Debug -> Convert particle systems to PhotonDust

WARNING: Do not overwrite any items/worlds with converted versions! This will bake in any conversion bugs without being able to resolve them Once PhotonDust is fully polished, we will remove the Experimental label, remove the legacy particle system and make conversion fully automatic

• • PhotonDust has a number of new features:
    • Designed for performance, with multi-threading & semi-asynchronous updates - heavy particle system updates (e.g. complex collisions with the world) will not drop your FPS as much - only the particle system itself will drop its update rate
    • Highly modular - particle initialization, simulation and rendering is handled by modules, instead of a monolithic component - compose the behaviors you want for your particle system! This also makes adding new features and modules much easier in the future!
    • Feature parity with legacy system - any effects supported by the legacy particle system are supported with PhotonDust as well
  • It also introduces many new modules and features over the legacy particle system:
    • Split constant / min-max initializers for particle properties (e.g. if you want only a single value, you don't have to set both value to min/max anymore)
    • Linear, Radial, Turbulent (simplex noise) and 3D Texture-based forces for particles
    • Velocity Drag that allows particles to slow down (requested by @AlphaNeon, issue #3288)
    • Size over lifetime, Size sine multiplier (to create wobble effects) and more
    • Consistent position & rotation coordinate system handling
    • Color by orientation direction, color from Texture 3D, Color over lifetime in HSV space, Color over lifetime from texture
    • Particle trails with unique color/size for each segment of the trails
    • Configurable ribbon splitting - split by time proximity or fixed sequence - you can separate ribbons between groups of particles if there was a gap between the emission
    • Particle lights module supports more light properties
    • Particle trails can now be simulated in any space (independent of the particles themselves), not just world-space
    • Unified emission direction handling and number of new emitter options, such as:
  • Colors for point emitters (previously requested by @Baxter, issue #3138)
  • Circle orientation for CircleEmitter
  • Per-point particle direction for LineEmitter
  • Body/cap emission direction for Cylinder emitter
  • And a bunch more!
• Overhauled interaction cursor management (implemented by @ProbablePrime)
  • Cursors are now configurable in settings, you can control the base size and various multipliers that affect the cursor when interacting with other objects
  • This fixes cursor size inconsistencies, with cursor being too small in some cases and having poor contrast (reported by @Shifty, @ProbablePrime and @Frooxius, issue #3124 and a business client)
  • This foundational work, allows for further Cursor changes in the future, so check the GH for more!
• Added MultiChannelSimplexTexture3D
  • This allows specifying simplex noise parameters for each of the color channels independently
  • You can also set Min, Max and Exp values to process the noise
• Added "AutoAddIgnoreTags" to aligners "AutoAddChildren"
  • This allows ignoring any children with specific tag from being auto-added
  • This is initialized by default with "AUTO_INJECTED" tag - this tag will be added to some automatically injected children during upgrade process
  • This fixes PhotonDust upgrade process from breaking some aligners (based on report by @UltrawideGamer and @Foolish, issue #3329)

Optimizations:

• Fixed TrackedDevicePositioner registering setting listener every frame, rather than just once, resulting in performance degradation (reported by @esnya, issue [https://github.com/yellow-Dog-Man/resonite-Issues/issues/3351 #3351})

Locale:

• Merged German locale update by @Muppeq
• Merged Japanese locale update by @Aesc
• Merged Polish locale update by @FoxoBread
• Merged Chinese locale update by modimobeikete
• Merged Korean locale update by @MirPASEC
• Merged Russian locale update by @Shadow Panther [RU/EN, UTC+1/+2]
• Merged French locale update by @Jae “awa” J4

Tweaks:

• Updated yt-dlp from 2024.12.06 to 2024.12.13