CopperCube 6 released!

CopperCube 6 is now available on Steam. For upgrading from Pro version 5, see below. Here are the detailed changes in version 6:

• CopperCube is now free

  Coppercube is now free. No more limited amount of scenes, no complicated licensing terms. From now on, you can use CopperCube for free to develop your games, and sell them, publish them on Steam, any App Store, your website or what every you want to.

• Post-Processing Effects

  CopperCube now includes an list of built-in post effects which can make your scenes look a lot better: Bloom, Black and White, Invert, Blur, Colorize and Vignette. This is one of the few features which are only available in the professional and studio edition. They work on the Windows, Mac OS and WebGL targets. Posteffects can also be adjusted, enabled and disabled during runtime using scripting. See the documentation for this.

• Full FBX import with Animation

  CopperCube now supports loading all types of FBX files. This also includes animated fbx files, with skinned meshes (as for animated characters). It also searches for textures automatically, if they are referenced wrongly. Previously, it supported loading only FBX 2011, FBX 2012 and FBX 2013 files, now it loads all existing formats from Maya and Max created with the FBX plugin, and in addition these: AutoCAD (>=2011), MotionBuilder (>=5.5), Flame (>=8), Inferno (>=5.0), Smoke (>=6.0), and Revit Architecture(>= 2009.1)

• New lighting system

  CopperCube now uses a new lighting system which makes it possible to use much more bright lights (up to 4 times brighter). If you are working on a project with an older version of CopperCube, note the following: - The editor will automatically convert your color and light settings to the new system. But be sure to make a backup of your project before. - If you used static lighting in your project, it will likely now look a bit different. You need to recalculate the lighting for all your scenes by pressing the "calculate!" button. You also probably need to adjust the radii and colors of your lights a bit after updating. - The ambient light setting is now very sensitive. Keep it at low values to make everything look nice.

• Unified colors and lighting

  In older versions of CopperCube, it could happen that for example if you set specific lights with realtime shadows, your scene could look slightly different on different platforms, like for example on WebGL and the Windows .exe target. This is no longer the case, your scenes will now look the same everywhere.

• DDS support

  CopperCube now supports DDS files. You can now import these as textures, and they will work on all supported platforms.

• WebGL 2 support

  CopperCube now uses WebGL 2 when available, and falls back to WebGL 1 if not there. When using WebGL 1, post effects might not look that nice because of it's missing non-power-of-two render target support. In WebGL 2, this is no problem.

• Loading screen image

  Additionally to the text and background color, it is now possible to select a logo image for the loading screen. In the free edition, this is fixed to be a CopperCube logo, but in the professional and studio edition of CopperCube, you can change or even remove the logo.

• Multi Selection

  The editor finally supports multi-selection: You can now select more than one object at a time by holding down SHIFT while picking objects (and ALT to remove from selection). That way, you can now move, rotate, scale, delete and modifiy textures and properties of multiple objects at the same time. This works in the 3D view as well as in the scene graph explorer. It is now for example very easy to remove or change all trees in a terrain by selecting all of them in the scene graph explorer at once.

• WebGL automatic pointer lock

  The new 'Use pointer lock for FPS cameras' option in the publishing settings enables FPS cameras in your game to automatically use the pointer lock feature which is offered by most browsers today, even when not run in fullscreen mode.

• Freeze Scale command

  There is now a new built-in command for freezing the scale and normalizing the normals of meshes. This is useful if you have different sized models in your scene and want to have them all the same size, without a scale applied to them. Using this makes it simpler to calculate collisions between such objects, improves performance with physics and lighting.

• Freeze Scale command

  There is now a new built-in command for freezing the scale and normalizing the normals of meshes. This is useful if you have different sized models in your scene and want to have them all the same size, without a scale applied to them. Using this makes it simpler to calculate collisions between such objects, improves performance with physics and lighting.

• Improved skinned mesh player

  Coppercube now also supports displaying skinned meshes correctly such as animated characters when they have have duplicated vertices, for example with different UVs or Normals.

• Better Wireframe mode

  The wireframe mode view is now much more usable in the editor: All mesh wires are now drawn white, instead of shaded by their texture and light previously.

• Usable folder nodes - finally

  Folder nodes now store their open/close state in .ccb files

• Automatic DirectX installer

  If the users of your game don't have DirectX, or not the correct version installed, CopperCube generated Windows .exe files will now detect this and can install DirectX automatically, so the game will now run everywhere. To enable this feature, just enable the new "Include and run DirectX Installer when needed" option in the publishing settings: This will create a subfolder named "dxredist" for your app which includes the DirectX installer. When you distribute your game, be sure to include this. The game will automatically run the installer if needed. For details, see the documentation under "Windows (.exe) target -> Making sure it runs on your users systems"

• Scene Metrics tool

  The scene metrics tool, previously only available in the professional edition is now usable for everyone (which means for CopperCube 6 also in the free edition).

• Nicer User Interface

  The user interface of the editor has been modernized quite a bit. It looks a lot cleaner and more modern now, and it should be more easy to find the right tools now.

• More terrain generation options

  There are now a few more options to generate an initial terrain, like the possibility to select more than one texture for grass distributed over it. Also, the default textures and settings for terrain are now a bit nicer.

• Scene Metrics tool

  The scene metrics tool, previously only available in the professional edition is now usable for everyone (which means for CopperCube 6 also in the free edition).

• Lots of performance improvements

  The whole code base was modernized and improved, and updated to use a more modern compiler toolset, resulting in performance improvenments everywhere.

• Updated Lightmapper

  The lightmapper for calculating static lightmapping has been updated and improved a bit. Some of the default settings have also been updated a bit, for example it now uses a bigger resolution and ambient light by default.

• Improved OpenGL renderer

  CopperCube mainly uses Direct3D, but can also use OpenGL on Windows and Mac OS. This OpenGL renderer has been improved: - OpenGL vegetation rendering is now also supported - 2D Font rendering now is also working the same in the editor as in Direct3D - Texture filtering on terrain is now much nicer - Several performance improvements

• Rotation correction tool

  The animated models editor has now a new command to correct the rotation of imported, animated 3d models. If, for whatever reason your imported 3D model is for example laying instead of standing up, you can set a correctional rotation in this to fix this for all models in your project.

• Improved WebGL font rendering

  2D Text drawn using for example 2D Overlays in WebGL now is much more readable and sharper. Blurriness which occurred on some browsers has been removed now.

• Automatic clip prevention for FPS camera children

  If you have a weapon, a hand or something similar attached to your FPS camera, so that it looks like this is part of the player, these models are now automatically prevented to clip through walls and other objects. The FPS camera behavior has now also a checkbox to enable/disable this feature, named "DisableClippingForChildNodes" which is on by default.

• Node Types via scripting

  It is now possible to query the type of a node with scripting. Use ccbGetSceneNodeProperty(node, "Type"); in order to get a string revealing the type of the scene node, like "mesh", "animatedmesh", "billboard", "camera", "light", "mobile2dinput", "2doverlay", "particlesystem", "path", "sky", "sound", or "water".

• Flash support removed

  CopperCube no longer supports creating apps for the Flash platform. If you need to create Flash apps, you can still download and use CopperCube 5.

• DirectX 8 support removed

  Since there is virtually no PC anymore not supporting DirectX 9 at least (and only DirectX 8), support for DirectX 8 was removed.

• Updated Built-In Textures

  The built-in textures used by the editor have been updated. They now are of higher resolution and quality and look much nicer overall. Create a new terrain for example and see the difference.

• Modern D3D 11 based renderer preview (in closed alpha)

  Internally, CopperCube now has an additional D3D 11 renderer with support for more modern 3D features. It is not public yet, buggy, and still early alpha but will be enabled for public use in an update in the near future.

• Other, smaller changes

  - The documentation has been updated with new screenshots, tutorials, and of course documentation for all the new and changed features - The fallback rendering for reflective surfaces is now much nicer - Removed support for software rendering, only OpenGL and Direct3D are now supported - CopperCube is now compatible with the latest JDKs (meaning version 9 and 10) as well - The background color of the WebGL loading screen can now also be configured. This loading screen also uses now the specified loading logo image. - Improved error handling when rendering WebGL on systems with old or incompatible hardware - The WebGL platform printing now prints to the developer console if available, instead of logging them as errors in the error console. - The icon for cameras in the editor now indicates better where the target of the camera is, by mirroring the icon if necessary. - The default texture size of the lightmapper has been increased to create nicer results by default. - When importing coppercube scenes or adding prefabs, those no longer can influence or overwrite the global gravity, wind, fog or shadow - settings of the scene. - Fixed a bug causing Windows 10 steal the focus of the just published and running Windows .exe app, sometimes - Fixed a problem causing WebGL export not to write out all textures under very special circumstances - Fixed a bug causing the direction of the "Fly Circle" behavior not to be correct sometimes when loading it from a .ccb file - Fixed a bug causing cloned collision behaviors to be always affected by gravity ignoring the setting in the editor - Fixed a bug causing videos not to play sometimes if you chain more than two videos after each other in the "OnVideoEnded" slot in the PlayVideo action.

Note that CopperCube 5 still exists and might be useful for some users since CopperCube 6 removed a few features (like for example D3D8 and Flash support). If you want to upgrade to CopperCube 6 Pro, there is a Bundle available, which enables you to you buy CopperCube 6 Pro with a big discount, if you already own CopperCube 5 Pro.