Major Release 21.00

Library compatibility information

Library name Version Windows Linux OS X Notes
DGN Direct 3.8.1 supported unsupported unsupported  
HOOPS Exchange 2015 supported supported unsupported  
HOOPS Publish 2015 supported unsupported unsupported  
.NET Framework 4.0 supported unsupported unsupported v4.5 required for wpf_image v4.5 required for WPF over Remote Desktop
Parasolid 23.0 supported unsupported unsupported  
Qt 4.6.3 supported supported unsupported  
RealDWG 2015 supported unsupported unsupported Visual Studio 2012 only
SketchUp SDK v7 supported unsupported unsupported  

New features and enhancements

  • All 3D shader drivers now have support for rendering transparent backgrounds to an offscreen window target.
  • The visual selection algorithm has been enhanced to take advantage of available hardware acceleration on shader based drivers, improving selection performance.
  • There is a new quick moves heuristic, inplace, which is useful when using a transparent highlight style with quick move geometry.
  • Capping geometry can now be extracted to another segment.
  • You can now use selection culling to enable or disable selection of culled geometry.
  • Performance of view-dependent vertex markers (splat-rendering using filled circles and filled squares) has been improved in the DirectX 11 driver. See section 2.8.2.1 of the Programming Guide for details about vertex markers.
  • The performance of patterned line and edge drawing in the DX11 and OpenGL2 drivers has been improved by up to 15x. The reference manual entry for HC_Set_Line_Pattern contains further details.
  • You may now set a soft memory limit, which triggers an event when Visualize allocates more memory than specified.
  • Rendering performance when using static model has been improved for a wide variety of scene graph organizations.
  • There is a new ‘strength’ parameter for eye-dome lighting, which helps to smooth out any graphical anomalies in the image.
  • The double-precision rendering logic has been enhanced to take advantage OpenGL hardware acceleration when such acceleration is available. This will result in greatly improved rendering performance for double-precision primitives. More information is available in the OpenGL2 section of the Device Guide.
  • File loading performance for IFC files loaded through the HOOPS Exchange interface has been significantly improved.

Functional changes

  • The HIO_DWG2 interface has been renamed to HIO_DWG. The legacy HIO_DWG interface that was deprecated and replaced by HIO_DWG2 in version 20.00 is no longer provided.
  • Project changes

  • Windows: VS2012 and VS2013 are supported, and VS2010 has been dropped, consistent with our policy of supporting the two most recent Windows compilers. Please note the following implications:

    • HIO_DWG:

      RealDWG 2015 is supported. RealDWG 2013/2014 only support Visual Studio 2010 and thus no longer work with our projects.

    • HIO_DWF:

      This module is no longer supported because it is only available under Visual Studio 2010. Autodesk is no longer providing any ongoing support or mainentance for the DWF Toolkit.

OS X: Support for Qt has been dropped.