Version 1.0 to 1.1

2D Components that are moved by changing the Rectangles position can now only be moved within its background.

The text on the buttons is now aligned in the middle of the button. This can be changed by setting the attribute ‘TextAlignMiddle’ to false.

Added Arial and Verdana Fonts in different sizes.

Version 1.1 to 1.2 (29/10/2009)

Terrain:

Removed the Quadterrain from the Engine and replaced it with a new one. Take a look at this Article for more information.

The new Terrain-class supports heightmaps that are power of two (The old one did too after I made some changes but that led to other problems).

A Normalmap can be passed to the shader which gives a nice shadng effect with a low cost of performance.

The Level Of Detail (LOD) can be changed during runtime to lower to terrains detail to gain performance and vice versa.

The textures on the Terrain are way more detailed now. Depending on the distance to the camera, the texture will blend to a larger/smaller version of it which means the texture allways looks detailed at every distance.

The textures detail level can be changed on the prefrences to gain detail/performance.

Prefrences:

Added the tabs 'General' and 'Terrain' to the Prefrences.

General contains to options that were availible before. Terrain contains options to change the terrains dynamic values.

PhysicsActor:

The Physicsactors are using a new shader which improves performance (Still a very basic shader and new one will be included with the next update).

Water:

The Warer isn't working very well with the new Terrain. But as I plan to replace it due to the imense performance loss I will not fix the current issues (New Water should come with the next update).

Miscellaneous:

Added new Fonts.

Rearrange some of the code.

Minor Bug-Fixes

Version 1.2 to 1.3 (1/12/2009)

Terrain:

The Terrain is now scalable in both the size (x and z axis) and the height.
So you can easily create a very large terrain out of a small heightmap with a very small performance loss.

Normalmaps affect the terrains light correctly now.

The ambient light and the directed light can now be adjusted.

The terrains shader has been extended by a Fog calculation as the build in functions in the XNA Framework only work on Shader Model 2.

Skydome:

The Skydome is no longer affected by Fog.

Textfields:

The Textfields now have an attribute 'inputLimitiation' which is used to check which input is allow (numeric only, lower alpha only..).

Shadows:

The deferred shadows are now also working on the terrain.

Fixed a bug where the calculation of the shadow got inaccurate when the distance of light and the objects affected by it got to high.

Version 1.3 to 1.4 (08/02/2010)

2D Interface:

Added the component "Numeric Up-Down" which is basically a textfield which only allows numeric input and has 2 buttons to increase/decrease the value.

Terrain:

A new Method "GetExactHeight" has been added which doesn't just return the height of the vertex your are checking, but calculating the exact position on this vertex (Bilinear Interpolation)

Terrain Editor:

A Terrain Editor has been added (Options --> Terrain Editor) which allows you to change the shape and the textures of the terrain during runtime. The changes made to the terrain can be saved to a heightmap / texturemap to reuse them.
Currently you can Rise, Lower, Smooth and Flatten the terrain. Due to a new algorithmn to calculate the height of the terrains vertices, you will get perfectly smooth height differences when smoothing the whole terrain.
For the moment the terrains textures distribution is calculated according to the height when no texturemap is found.

Hardware Instancing:

PhysicsActors do now support Hardware-Instacing which allows you to draw the same model a few thousand time with minimal performance loss. At the moment only the Grass and Chair models use Hardware-Instancing. When using them in the Level-Editor you shouldn't notice any difference except that these models don't get affected by Frustum Culling.

Animated Plants:

The Class AnimatedPlants has been added for drawing Trees/Plants and 'fake' an animation. The objects do not contain an animation, the shader just moves the vertices of the model which results is a nice motion.

Particle System:

Particles now get affected by changing the scale.

Miscellaneous:

Added Frustum Culling. This means any object that is not seen by the camera doesn't get drawn.

Version 1.4 to 1.4.1 (17/04/2010)

PhysicsActor:

Can now support Hardware-Instancing. Hardware-Instancing makes sure that multiple occurences of an object will be drawn at once which results in an immense performance advantage.

Of cause not all objects can use Hardware-Instancing, for example models with multiple effects.

Water:

The water component can now be drawn using only refraction or reflection (or both of cause).

AnimatedPlant:

New class which inherits from PhysicsActor. Creates a vertex movement (looks like it's animated)

Interface:

Checkboxes do now automatically assign their 'Checked' value.

Terrain Editor:

Shape and Texture editor it now fully working.

Heightmaps can be saved and loaded during runtime.

New heightmaps in different sizes can be created during runtime.

Bugfixes:

Fixed a bug where multiple loading and saving led to incorrect data.

The Path to the terrains textures are now relative.

Fixed a bug where the gamescreens got serialized in the wrong order.

Version 1.4.1 to 1.4.2 (16/05/2010)

Sound:

Added a sound handler which can store and play soundeffects (wave) and music (wma, mp3).

Navigation Mesh:

As first step into AI, a Navigation Mesh was implemented to handle Pathfinding.

A Navigation Mesh has various advantages over waypoints, for some detailed information please take a look at this.

Shaders:

The model shader can now add transparency, diffuse light and/or specular light to models.