/*!
\page coin_new_features New Features in Coin
- @subpage coin400 "New Features in Coin v4.0.0"
- @subpage coin313 "New Features in Coin v3.1.3"
- @subpage coin312 "New Features in Coin v3.1.2"
- @subpage coin311 "New Features in Coin v3.1.1"
- @subpage coin310 "New Features in Coin v3.1.0"
- @subpage coin300 "New Features in Coin v3.0.0"
- @subpage coin250 "New Features in Coin v2.5.0"
- @subpage coin240 "New Features in Coin v2.4.0"
- @subpage coin230 "New Features in Coin v2.3.0"
- @subpage coin220 "New Features in Coin v2.2.0"
- @subpage coin210 "New Features in Coin v2.1.0"
- @subpage coin200 "New Features in Coin v2.0.0"

*/ 

/**
\page coin400 New Features in Coin v4.0.0

The build system has been migrated from GNU autotools to CMake.
Note that Coin 4.0 is still work in progress. 

This is a brief summary of the new features in Coin v4.0.0:
- Support for UNICODE text (starting with Coin 4.0 strings are
  UTF-8 encoded).
- View volume and projectors now support reverse perspective camera settings
- New SoReversePerspectiveCamera node added
- SoShaderStateMatrixParameter class now supports GLSL/ARB
  shaders in addition to Cg
- Support for linePatternScaleFactor in SoDrawStyle
- Support for newer compilers
- Auto-linking when using Visual Studio compiler
- ...

Bug fixes:
- Engine Output Referencing
- SoTextureCoordinatePlane Rendering Bug
- Memory leak during SoDB cleanup
- Wrong vertical offset used in SoOffscreenRenderer
- Incorrect normal binding for 3DS import
- SoInteractionKit 
- ...

*/

/**
\page coin313 New Features in Coin v3.1.3

This is a bugfix release.

Due to an underlying buildsystem upgrade, the default location of the
generated HTML docs changed from $datarootdir/share/Coin/html to
$datarootdir/share/doc/coin/html.

*/

/**
\page coin312 New Features in Coin v3.1.2

This is a bugfix release.

*/

/**
\page coin311 New Features in Coin v3.1.1

This is a bugfix release.

Bugs are fixed in all the NURBS related classes, and SoIndexedPointSet.

*/

/**
\page coin310 New Features in Coin v3.1.0

This is a brief summary of the new features in Coin v3.1.0:
- Default transparency type for SoGLRenderAction changed from
  SCREEN_DOOR to BLEND.
- SoBase will not keep a list of unnamed / empty named nodes any
  more. This is both an optimization and improves conformance to SGI /
  TGS Inventor.
- SbTesselator does better when handed certain polygons, due to improved
  precision in internal calculations.
- Resource usage pressure significantly lower for common case scene
  graphs with regard to mutex allocations. A not entirely uncommon
  problem on MS Windows systems for huge scene graphs was that the
  run-time system ran out of available mutexes -- this is now very
  unlikely to happen.
- Builds with G++ and MSVC will have C++ exception support enabled by
  default.
- SoSceneManager render callback can be set to NULL to disable it.
- Non-power-of-two textures are automatically supported if the OpenGL
  driver has that feature.
- No other intentional differences in semantics, other than for any bugs
  fixed.

*/

/**
\page coin300 New Features in Coin v3.0.0

This is a brief summary of the new features in Coin v3.0:
- New scene graph traversal profiling subsystem.
- New node SoVertexAttribute which provides vertex attribute support for
  shaders.
- New SoDepthBuffer node to control depth buffer settings.
- New SoShadowSpotLight node in the shadow generation subsystem.
- New SoHeightMapToNormalMap engine to convert depthmap images to three-
  component normal maps.
- SoPickStyle has three new style settings, SHAPE_ON_TOP,
  BOUNDING_BOX_ON_TOP, and SHAPE_FRONTFACES.
- Integrated XML parser used for various purposes.
- GL feature control through a new GLDriverDatabase subsystem which is
  configurable through XML files.
- Statechart XML engine, which has been used to implement examiner-mode
  viewer navigation at the Coin level (earlier this functionality was
  implemented over and over again in the various GUI libraries).
- Foreign file format support through SoForeignFileKit, with an example
  SoSTLFileKit implementation for STL import.
- There is a testsuite framework based on Boost.Test
- Translation draggers (1D/2D) are now fitted with new fields minTranslation
  and maxTranslation to add the ability of restricting the range the draggers
  can operate in.  When this feature is used, and draggers are stored to
  file, it has consequences for the file format, and you lose the ability
  to load those files with older versions of Coin.
- Slight change in antialiased rendering with SoGLRenderAction::setNumPasses().
  Antialiased rendering is no longer shifted 1/2 pixel to the left compared to
  single-pass non-antialiased rendering.
- Dynamic loading of support libraries for Mac OS X has been changed, which
  has consequences for which possibilities are available for bundling such
  libraries when creating your application bundles.

*/

/*!
\page coin250 New Features in Coin v2.5.0

This is a brief summary of the new features in Coin v2.5.0, grouped by
feature category.

\section geonodes Geographical Data Support

The Geopgraphic Data Support nodes are partly based on GeoVRML
(http://www.geovrml.org/), and partly based on our own UTM-nodes which
can be found in the SmallChange library.

The Geographic Data Support nodes makes it possible to create
e.g. globe-spanning models that you can navigate around in without
getting into float precision problems ("the shakes").  Some assistance
from the application code is needed for this though; it is not a fully
automatic solution.

New nodes:
- SoGeoOrigin
- SoGeoLocation
- SoGeoSeparator
- SoGeoCoordinate

In addition to new nodes, SoCamera and its derived nodes have been
updated to support the SoGeoOrigin node.

The coordinate system support in the above nodes are currently a bit
lacking (only a few systems/zones are supported), but this will
improve over time.  API-changes should not be needed to extend this,
so patchlevel releases would be enough to add more coordinate systems.

The VRML2 counterparts of the above nodes, which would be a subpart of
implementing the GeoVRML extension, are not yet in development, but
they might show up for the next major release since a big part of the
implementation will be shared.

Note: These above SoGeo*-nodes make the UTM*-nodes in the SmallChange
library obsolete (for anyone who uses those), so the support for those
nodes will eventually be deprecated and removed.  They won't be
removed over night though, but for new users: avoid starting to use
the UTM*-nodes at all cost to avoid having to waste time on a port
down the line.

\section shadernodes Generic GLSL Shader Support

Shader support is implemented through a set of new shader nodes, more
or less compatible with the corresponding TGS extensions.  Beyond
GLSL, Coin also supports ARB shaders and Cg shaders (if the Cg library
is installed).  However, we will only recommend the use of the shader
language GLSL and put our focus on that one.

New nodes:
- SoShaderProgram
- SoVertexShader
- SoFragmentShader
- SoGeometryShader

See also the \link coin_shaders "Shaders in Coin"\endlink page for more
information.

\section shadownodes Generic Shadow Rendering Functionality

Support for rendering shadows has been added to Coin through a set of
shader-based nodes.  The technique used is the Variance Shadow Maps
technique (http://www.punkuser.net/vsm/).

New nodes:
- SoShadowGroup
- SoShadowCulling
- SoShadowStyle

\section vborendering Vertex Buffer Object (VBO) Usage

A lot of nodes have had their rendering code optimized for VBO usage,
giving great performance increases.  However, this is not universally
enabled - it is necessary to organize the scene graphs in specific ways
for VBOs to be used.

See the \link vbo_rendering VBO Rendering in Coin \endlink page for a
detailed description.

Relevant classes:
- SoVertexProperty
- SoReorganizeAction

\section sbclasses Expanded Sb* Class Collection

The set of Sb* classes in Coin has been expanded greatly, with most
notable a whole skew of SbVec and SbBox classes.  The reasoning behind
this move was that historically these classes were just added as
needed, one by one, causing the stable branch of Coin and the
development branch of Coin to diverge and become more and more
incompatible as time went by.  Also, extension nodes were created in
peripheral libraries that used these new classes from the Coin
development branch, and consequently couldn't be built gainst the
stable branch of Coin.  With this preemptive class set expansion, we
hope to cause that the Coin stable branch and the Coin development
branch stay closer in sync over a longer period, and that the
incompatibility divergence will happen around major new feature sets
instead of around minor details.

New Sb*-classes: \break
SbBox2i32, SbBox3i32, SbBox3d, SbVec2b, SbVec2ub, SbVec2us, SbVec2i32,
SbVec2ui32, SbVec3b, SbVec3ub, SbVec3us, SbVec3i32, SbVec3ui32,
SbVec4b, SbVec4ub, SbVec4s, SbVec4us, SbVec4i32, SbVec4ui32, SbXfBox3d

Note: You can also find a good deal of these classes in TGS Inventor, so
this was also a TGS compatibility move.

\section fieldclasses Expanded Field Class Collection

The exact same reasoning as for the Sb*-classes goes for the field
classes.

New field classes: \break
SoSFBox2s, SoSFBox2i32, SoSFBox2d, SoSFBox2d, SoSFBox3i32, SoSFBox3d,
SoSFColorRGBA, SoSFDouble, SoSFVec2b, SoSFVec2i32, SoSFVec2d,
SoSFVec3b, SoSFVec3i32, SoSFVec4b, SoSFVec4ub, SoSFVec4s, SoSFVec4us,
SoSFVec4i32, SoSFVec4ui32, SoSFVec4d, SoMFColorRGBA, SoMFDouble,
SoMFVec2b, SoMFVec2s, SoMFVec2i32, SoMFVec2d, SoMFVec3b, SoMFVec3s,
SoMFVec3i32, SoMFVec4b, SoMFVec4ub, SoMFVec4s, SoMFVec4us,
SoMFVec4i32, SoMFVec4ui32, SoMFVec4d

\section frustumcamera SoFrustumCamera node

This node is added to make it possible to set up a custom camera with
full control over the view volume. SoFrustumCamera is basically a
mapping of the OpenGL glFrustum() method.

The typical use of SoFrustumCamera is in a CAVE or MultiPipe
environment where it's often necessary to set up cameras based on the
configuration of the different displays.

\section misc250 Miscellaneous

Below follows a non-exhaustive list of other, more minor, tweaks and
tidbits.

\subsection sofile SoSearchAction on SoFile nodes

To facilitate control over whether an SoFile node should traverse its
children during an SoSearchAction traversal, two static methods have been
added to SoFile.

New functions:
- SoFile::setSearchOK() [static]
- SoFile::getSearchOK() [static]

\subsection sbtypeinfo SbTypeInfo<T> template type information library

For those who write generic code using C++ templates, a template type
information library has been added for the primitive Coin-types, so you
can use type relations for populating a template instead of needing
template parameters for all changing types of the template, or you can
write generic code on type attributes like the number of dimensions of an
SbVec class.  SbTypeInfo<T> can be found in Inventor/SbTypeInfo.h.

\subsection vcprojects Visual Studio Projects

The Visual Studio projects have been split into projects for separately
building, installing, uninstalling the Coin SDK, and document generation.
This was done primarily to be able to build without automatically
performing the installation procedure at the same time, but also to offer
other supplementary targets later like the doc-generation project...

*/


/*!
\page coin240 New Features in Coin v2.4.0

The primary reason for the 2.4.0 release was the option of finally
building Coin from source on MS Windows without having to go through
the Cygwin process.

There had also been various optimization work on rendering traversal
code, file i/o and other things.

For v2.4.1, SoExtSelection LASSO and RECTANGLE select could be aborted
by the end-user by hiting the 'END' key.  No API-changes was needed
for this of course.

For v2.4.2, we hacked in support for compressed textures through an
API/ABI-invisible field in SoTexture2, called
"enableCompressedTexture".  This field will remain "invisible" until
Coin v3.0.0 is released, and can only be accessed from .iv-file input
or through the SoFieldContainer API.

For v2.4.6, SbViewVolume::getAlignRotation() was implemented, and
SoToVRML2Action got support for SoUnits in relation to
SoVRMLTransform nodes.

*/

/*!
\page coin230 New Features in Coin v2.3.0

This is a brief summary of the new features in Coin v2.3.0:
- More Multi-Texturing (see SoTextureCombine)
- Texture coordinate mapping nodes
  - SoTextureCoordinateCube
  - SoTextureCoordinateCylinder
  - SoTextureCoordinateSphere

*/

/*!
\page coin220 New Features in Coin v2.2.0

This is a brief summary of the new features in Coin v2.2.0:
- Multi-Texturing (see SoTextureUnit)
- Bump-Mapping
  - SoBumpMap
  - SoBumpMapCoordinate
  - SoBumpMapTransform
- Better Font Support
- TrueType font support for all 3D text primitive types.
- Render To Texture Support (see SoSceneTexture2)
- REPLACE texture model support for SoTexture2
- pbuffer support for SoOffscreenRenderer
- New transparency rendering type, SORTED_LAYERS_BLEND

*/

/*!
\page coin210 New Features in Coin v2.1.0

This is a brief summary of the new features in Coin v2.1.0:
- HardCopy Support: Vector output to PostScript.
- FreeType and Win32 TrueType Font Support
- Intersection Detection with SoIntersectionDetectionAction
- SoLineHighlightRenderAction / SoBoxHighlightRenderAction and Multiple SoSelection Nodes
- Compressed File I/O Support (see SoOutput::setCompression(), SoOutput::getAvailableCompressionMethods())
- Additional Convenience Functions SoInput::setStringArray() and SoAction::apply(SoAction *)
- NO_COPY SoSFImage CopyPolicy, SoSFImage::setValue with CopyPolicy::NO_COPY implemented.

*/

/*!
\page coin200 New Features in Coin v2.0.0

This is a brief summary of the new features in Coin v2.0.0:
- Big-Image Support
- 3D Textures Support
- 3D Sound Support
- VRML97 Support
- Mac OS X Support
- Multi-Pipe Rendering Support

*/

