Improved SSDO

The quality of SSDO is tremendously improved:

• No more circle artifacts on high settings for AO, now it is physically correct and affects only the ambient light component.
• No more noise for real-time GI. It has a full set of adjustment settings.

Sun light + ProbLight GI (with specular) + AO + LO:

Global Illumination

A new, real-time global illumination based on precomputed spherical harmonics allows to render high-detail diffuse lighting with interreflections and angle-dependent specular highlights. It is fully interactive: soft environment light illuminates both static geometry in the scene and dynamic objects moving around it.

Network cluster system

A new Syncker is a scalable multi-node rendering system that makes it easy to create highly immersive CAVE systems or large-scale visualization walls on a computer cluster synchronised over the network in real-time.

Simply connect multiple computers over LAN and turn your monitors into one high-resolution seamless display with a Unigine application running on it at lightning speed. It does not matter if these computers are running on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X at the same time, as Syncker works even across different platforms. Moreover, virtual environments can be of any monitor configuration, since all viewports are fully configurable.

Render:

• Added Overlap and Overlay modes for detail materials into mesh_terrain_base material. Now caves, cliffs and other meshes can have the same detail texturing as a terrain does.
• Improved support of geometry shaders on Mac OS X. Now wireframe mode and bokeh DOF are supported on this platform.
• Added SHADER_LANGUAGE definition to define a version of OpenGL and OpenGL ES shaders.
• Engine profiler and engine messages are now always rendered on top.
• Fixed incorrect rendering of static reflections for water.
• WorldOccluderTerrain now properly works with reflections (for example, on the water).
• Increased the number of HDR cross flares up to 32 (beware, high number of flares can cause a FPS drop on low-performance hardware).
• Fixed an issue with normal map orientation for one of the projection faces for mesh_triplanar_base material.
• Fixed an issue with triplanar projection for mesh_triplanar_base and terrain_base materials.
• Added an option to change normals rendering mode for mesh_overlap_base material ( States -> Substitute option). Normal maps of an underlying and overlapping material are either combined together (by default), or only the overlapping material normals are used.
• Added support of two background cube map textures for sky_base material.

Mobile Platforms:

Render:

• Added billboards_cloud_base material for ObjectBillboards to create scattered clouds that interact with the environment and lighting (see a picture below).
• Improved volumetric clouds turbulence and added a Z-axis noise mask transformation to create higher-detailed, swirly volumetric clouds.
• Added hardware support of a custom mouse cursor for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
• Improved performance of DirectX 11 shaders.
• Removed Direct3D10 support.
• Added DirectX 11 renderer of DirectX 9 feature level (Direct3D119). This mode is set by engine if a graphics card is compatible only with DirectX 9. It will be mostly used for next-generation mobile devices, i.e. with Windows 8 on ARM processors. Shadows are not supported due to hardware limitations.
• OpenGL ES is no longer supported for default shaders (it's still supported for simplified shaders though).
• Simple shaders are automatically loaded if OpenGL ES or Direct3D119 renderers are used.
• Impostors were completely removed.
• Added separate Scale parameters for all HDR flares to avoid overexposure.
• Addedrender_manager_create_dummy_textures/ meshes console commands. If set to 1 (by default), downsized textures and dummy meshes (without any vertex data, only surfaces are listed) are pre-loaded first at high speed. Full-sized textures and meshes with all geometry data are loaded only on demand, when they get into the view. This makes the world start-up much faster.
• Console command render_manager_list now prints a texture format name (it's useful for debugging).
• Added orthographic projection support for Widget manipulators.
• ObjectMeshClutter and ObjectMeshCluster are even faster for meshes with multiple surfaces.

ObjectBillboards with billboards_cloud_base material can be used to create foggy clouds that interact with environment and hide mountain peaks. As the sun changes it position, clouds are lit differently.