Cocos2d-x 3.13 Release Notes

Misc Information

Full Changelog

v3.13

Highlights

added VR plugins for Gear, Deepoon, Google Cardboard and Oculus.
support ETC1 alpha channel
fix AudioEngine performance for Android 4.2+
improve canvas renderer performance with dirty region
add Andorid arm-64 support
switch to use gcc 4.9
upgrade CURL to 7.50.0
upgrade Spine to 3.4
upgrade GLFW to 3.2

The main features in detail of Cocos2d-x v3.13

Added VR plugins

Support for Gear, Deepoon, Google Cardboard and Oculus has been added. Read about VR in our Programmers Guide

Support ETC1 alpha channel

Thanks halx99's contribution, now cocos2d-x supports ETC1 alpha channel by default.

If want to use ETC1 alpha chaneel, you should put xxx.pkm and xxx.pkm@alpha in the same folder, and use it like this:

auto sprite = Sprite::create("xxx.pkm");

xxx.pkm@alpha is the resource for alpha channel. @alpha subfix is required by engine to load alpha texture automatically.

More detail usage can refer to the implementation of Sprite1ETC1Alpha in tests/cpp-tests/Classes/SpriteTest/SpriteTest.cpp.

As you can see, the blue block in the middle of the picture is an ETC1 picture with alpha channel.

AudioEngine performance for Android 4.2+

AudioEngine uses OpenSL ES on Android, and it supports decoding audio source file to PCM data in codes since Android 4.2. Now AudioEngine uses this feature to fix the performance issue. The performane is the same as before if running on Android 4.1 or lower version. Should preload first, or there is not performance improved for first time playing of the audio.

Dirty region in canvas renderer

In v3.12, we improved WebGL renderer in the web engine, this version have brought the dirty region algorithm to improve canvas renderer performance. Basically, it detect every region that have been changed between frames, then only render these parts instead of refresh the whole canvas. This technique is beneficial for many games in which the dynamic region is often limited, it can improve frame rate and reduce CPU usage, power consumation. It's desactivated by default, to activate it, you can do the following:

// Enable dirty region algorithm
if (cc._renderType === cc.game.RENDER_TYPE_CANVAS) {
    cc.renderer.enableDirtyRegion(true);
    // Maximum dirty region count to activate the partial rendering process
    cc.renderer.setDirtyRegionCountThreshold(6);
}
// Detect if dirty is enabled
var enabled = isDirtyRegionEnabled();

Android arm-64 support

Now we provide arm-64 bit 3rd party libraries, which means can build 64-bit apps on Android. You can use the command to build 64-bit apps:

cocos run -p android --app-abi arm64-v8a

Switch to use gcc 4.9 on Android

cocos2d-x switch to use clang in v3.12, but developers reported some crash issue that caused by using clang+gnustl_static, so we switch to use gcc 4.9. We will change to use clang+c++_static when c++_static is stable.

Upgrade CURL to 7.50.0

Because CURL has a bug about connect to IPV4 numerical IP address in NAT64 environment, and it is fixed in v7.50.0, so we upgrade to this version when v7.50.0 is released.

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