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@raysan5 raysan5 released this 04 Nov 19:24
· 2326 commits to master since this release
4.0.0
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It's been about 6 months since last raylib release and it's been 8 years since I started with this project, what an adventure! It's time for a new release: raylib 4.0, the biggest release ever and an inflexion point for the library. Many hours have been put in this release to make it special, many library details have been polished: syntax, naming conventions, code comments, functions descriptions, log outputs... Almost all the issues have been closed (only 3 remain open at the moment of this writing) and some amazing new features have been added. I expect this raylib 4.0 to be a long term version (LTS), stable and complete enough for any new graphic/game/tool application development.

Let's start with some numbers:

  • +130 closed issues (for a TOTAL of +1030!)
  • +550 commits since previous RELEASE
  • +20 functions ADDED to raylib API
  • +60 functions ADDED to rlgl API
  • +40 functions RENAMED/REVIEWED/REDESIGNED
  • +60 new contributors (for a TOTAL of +275!)

Highlights for raylib 4.0:

  • Naming consistency and coherency: raylib API has been completely reviewed to be consistent on naming conventions for data structures and functions, comments and descriptions have been reviewed, also the syntax of many symbols for consistency; some functions and structs have been renamed (i.e. struct CharInfo to struct GlyphInfo). Output log messages have been also improved to show more info to the users. Several articles have been writen in this process: raylib_syntax analysis and raylib API usage analysis. In general, a big polishment of the library to make it more consistent and coherent.

  • Event Automation System: This new experimental feature has been added for future usage, it allows to record input events and re-play them automatically. This feature could be very useful to automatize examples testing but also for tutorials with assited game playing, in-game cinematics, speedruns, AI playing and more! Note this feature is still experimental.

  • Custom game-loop control: As requested by some advance users, the game-loop control can be exposed compiling raylib with the config flag: SUPPORT_CUSTOM_FRAME_CONTROL. It's intended for advance users that want to control the events polling and also the timming mechanisms of their games.

  • rlgl 4.0: This module has been completely decoupled from platform layer and raylib, now rlgl single-file header-only library only depends on the multiple OpenGL backends supported, even the dependency on raymath has been removed. Additionally, support for OpenGL 4.3 has been added, supporting compute shaders and Shader Storage Buffer Objects (SSBO). Now rlgl can be used as a complete standalone portable library to wrap several OpenGL version and providing a simple and easy-to-use pseudo-OpenGL immediate-mode API.

  • raymath 1.5: This module has been reviewed and some new conventions have been adopted to make it more portable and self-contained:

    • Functions are self-contained, no function use other raymath function inside, required code is directly re-implemented
    • Functions input parameters are always received by value
    • Functions use always a "result" variable for return
    • Angles are always in radians (DEG2RAD/RAD2DEG macros provided for convenience)

  • raygui 3.0: The official raylib immediate-mode gui library (included in raylib/src/extras) has been updated to a new version, embedding the icons collection and adding mulstiple improvements. It has been simplified and constrained for a better focus on its task: provide a simple and easy-to-use immediate-mode-gui library for small tools development.

  • raylib_parser: Added new tool to parse raylib.h and tokenize its enums, structs and functions, extracting all required info (name, params, descriptions...) into custom output formats (TXT, XML, JSON...) for further processing. This tool is specially useful to automatize bindings generation. Hopefully, this tool will make life easier to binding creators to update their bindings for raylib 4.0 or adding new ones!

  • Zig and Odin official support for raylib: Those two new amazing programming languages are officially supporting raylib, Zig lists raylib as an official example for C interoperatibility and Odin officially supports raylib as a vendor library. Both languages also have several bingings to raylib. Additionally, Zig build system supported has been added to compile raylib library and examples.

Those are some of the key features for this new release but actually there is way more! Support for VOX (MagikaVoxel) 3d model format has been added, new raylib_game_template repo shared, new EncodeDataBase64() and DecodeDataBase64() functions added, improved HiDPI support, new DrawTextPro() with support for text rotations, completely reviewed glTF models loading, added SeekMusicStream() for music seeking, many new examples and +20 examples reviewed... hundreds of improvements and bug fixes! Make sure to check CHANGELOG for a detailed list of changes!

Undoubtely, this is the best raylib ever. Enjoy gamedev/tools/graphics programming! :)

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