While one half of the developers were busy with the 2.5 project, the other half happily continued working on directly usable and useful features in Blender. Especially advances in the Game Engine justifies having a well tested, bug fixed and stable 2.49b release.
Check this impressive long list of features!
blender.org team, May/June/September 2009
List of reported problems in 2.49, an update release has been done now.
The Game Engine now supports multiple streams of video textures for interactive playback in environments. You can use video files (also from URLs), image files, video captures, memory buffer, camera render or a mix of that.
This feature allows artists to visualize their interactive projects within an immersive dome environment. Blender supports Fulldome, Truncated domes (front and rear), Planetariums and domes with spherical mirrors.
Significant speedup has been achieved in several areas;
- Scene Graph optimizes static objects
- View Frustum culling
- Occlusion culling
- Faster Bullet physics initializing
Overall improvement is signifacent, a complex game like YoFrankie runs 3x faster now.
The Bullet library upgrade in this release includes brand new generic 6dof constraint with run-time configurable limits, motors and springs to allow for physics-based vehicles, forklift, robots and ragdolls. And more...
Support for non-time dependent modifiers in the GE: no need to apply the modifiers before running the game! Works for physics shape too.
Improve stability, documentation and completeness for the python API.
* Attribute access
* GameObject properties of any type.
* OpenGL and Geometry modules
* New logic and the rendering functions
* Better error feedback
Next to Compositing and Materials, Blender Textures now support Node editing. You can use it to create advanced procedural textures, including fractal based systems. And even better, a Texture Nodetree can even become a Brush for painting.
Painting in the 3D view has been improved to support projection painting which allows you to paint directly onto your model without having to worry about UV mapping or seams.
Etch-a-ton is a development snapshot for sketching techniques applied to rigging. It can be used both for creating chains of deformation bones through various subdivision techniques or through retargetting templates
In 2.49 you can put a Boolean Modifier on any level in the stack, allowing you to intersect deformed or subdivided models too. You can also insert multiple Booleans in one stack now.
Blender now supports the new high quality JPEG format. It has much better compression, supports Alpha layers, and HDR color up to 16 bits per channel. JPEG2000 support is available in Blender everywhere, including Sequencer, Compositor and UV texture editor.
New scripts have been added, tools such as Landscape or Bolt generators, and the importer/exporters had several updates and fixes.
Also worth visiting is the very complete (over 300) Scripts Catalog in our wiki.
A lot of smaller features and bug fixes were done for 2.49 as well. Hundreds of reports were handled the past 6 months.