Verge3D for Blender 4.3.0

What's new in this version:

New Virtual Reality Demo:
- This Verge3D release introduces some new tools to simplify the creation of highly interactive VR apps (more about these tools below). We employed these features to create a new VR demo. It is different from our other example app Snowballs VR in that it contains much less game logic, and does not use any true physics for collisions. This makes it much easier to learn from and reuse in your projects:
- Walking around in virtual space using a pre-modeled collision mesh
- Grabbing and throwing things (fruits) with both hands
- Interacting with things (home appliances and drink)
- Playing back audio effects attached to user actions

VR Demo – Under the Hood:
- Applications like the one linked above can now be relatively easily created thanks to a new entry in the puzzle library called VR controls

Other WebXR Improvements:
- Speaking of VR controllers, we made using them even more easier by adding the mapping option to the get gamepad property puzzle

Puzzles Editor:
- You can now rename tabs in the Puzzles editor through double-clicking on their names, and can also create new tabs faster. When a new tab created, the modal window to type its name no longer appears – instead, the cursor blinks on its default name (‘New Tab’), suggesting renaming it right away.

Order-Independent Transparency:
- It’s a well-known issue of real-time graphics that rendering of layered transparent surfaces can cause severe artifacts to appear, and then jitter when viewing from a varying angle. At the same time, some model parts can be missing altogether due to wrong ordering of polygons.

Depth Prepass Transparency:
- We supported the combination of Blender’s shader settings which enables an alternative mode for rendering transparent surfaces. If you select Alpha Blend for your material, and disable Show Backface at the same time, the object will be rendered by using the special technique called “Depth Prepass” which renders only one (nearest to the viewer) transparency layer.

Puzzles:
- The raycast puzzle obtained a new option, “only visible”, which we enabled by default to retain the old behavior for this puzzle. The thing is that you can switch it off to cast rays to invisible objects as well. For example, this can be a collision mesh used for moving in VR space. See the above-mentioned library item called VR Controls for a working example.

Blender-Specific Features:
- Verge3D is now compatible with Blender 3.6 which is in alpha status at the moment
- We fixed the crash with gltf-compatible materials in older versions of Blender
- We fixed loading of scenes with meshes shared by skinned and non-skinned objects. This issue was reported through the Enterprise support channel.
- We fixed the export crash when using Follow Path constraints in Blender older than 2.93. Thank for reporting this on the forums.

NPM Package and Puzzles Logic:
- We published both an ES6-modules-based and a conventional builds of Verge3D in the npm repository. This package also includes a script to activate the license. It makes it possible to create a Verge3D application with just a few lines of JavaScript code (way shorter than Three.js!).

Optimizations:
- We reworked the feature for converting a Verge3D app into a desktop application. From now on, it will download its dependencies from our CDN instead of GitHub. You can also manually download the Electron.js builds so that no Internet connection is required at all for operation of the converter. This can reduce the time required for building desktop apps. This also helps overcome various network issues such as caused by proxy servers, firewalls etc.

More Improvements:
- We synced Verge3D with the underlying Three.js library. Version r148 improves stability, performance and cleans up outdated code. Some of the newly introduced features of Three.js will be used in our own development.

Documentation and Help:
- You can now provide your own User Manual URL in the App Manager

User Manual Updates:
- We updated the section about debugging mobile apps, as the modern browsers can now generate QR codes themselves. At the same time, both iOS and Android can now scan QR codes without any third-party apps.

Fixed:
- We fixed the bug with the Flying camera which jumped wildly when using keyboard controls
- We fixed the issue with downloading of very big files from the Asset Store
- We fixed the bug with using local variables in the puzzle exec script. Thanks for reporting this on the forums.
- We fixed the bug with node groups occurred in Blender 3.3+ reported on the forums here and here
- We fixed potential freezes of the App Manager when running lots of operations at the same time
- We fixed the error occurred when a new order is created via WordPress plugin interface, reported on the forums