NifSkope-2.0.dev9-20240608

• The UV editor now supports exporting Starfield .mesh files. Note: currently only the first available LOD can be edited, and to be able to render the model with the modifications, the file needs to be saved to a path where it is found by NifSkope as a resource, and the NIF reloaded (Alt+X) after closing resources (Alt+Q).
• Implemented the "Flip UV" and "Remove Unused Vertices" spells for BSTriShape geometry. Note that skinned meshes are not supported yet by the latter.
• Fixed the "Search Other Games if no match" resource setting, and the edit and browse path widgets not being enabled/disabled according to the game status.
• SizedString16 data fields are now shown and can be edited as strings.
• Anti-aliasing above 4x can be enabled on Linux by adding "Render\General\Antialiasing%20Limit=4" to the configuration file (NifTools/NifSkope 2.0.conf) under Settings.
• Minor Starfield rendering optimization.

NifSkope-2.0.dev9-20240602

• Added limited (read only) Starfield support to the UV editor.
• Implemented texture slot selection in the UV editor for Fallout 3 and newer games.
• Fixed textures not being rendered in the UV editor.
• Implemented the Prune Triangles mesh spell for games using BSTriShape geometry.
• Layered emissivity settings are now shown in Starfield BSLightingShaderProperty blocks.
• The resource manager has been overhauled to allow for multiple loose NIF files to use local data paths when opened in separate windows. GameManager functions can now also be accessed from NifModel.
• Starfield rendering fixes.

NifSkope-2.0.dev9-20240521

• The screenshot dialog now saves the image format and path selected as settings.
• Added limited support for rendering Starfield flipbooks and layered emissivity, and for the use vertex color as tint material setting. Flipbooks are currently animated only during movement, or while the M key is pressed.
• Fixed bugs in rendering ordered nodes.
• Fixed the axes not being correctly drawn depending on the OpenGL settings from the last shape.
• Fixes in the lighting only and textures disabled rendering modes.
• Fixed the hidden flag being ignored on Starfield shapes.
• Optimizations in the archive manager.
• Improvements and fixes to Starfield material support. Note: loading .mat files from archives is currently disabled for materials that also exist in CDB format. Base game materials can only be replaced with loose .mat files.

NifSkope-2.0.dev9-20240505

• Updated for Starfield version 1.11.33.0.
• Added support for saving screenshots in PNG format with transparency.
• Fixed U and V scale and offset controllers on Fallout 76 effect materials.
• Fixed bug in restoring the viewport size after saving supersampled screenshots.
• Shading is no longer disabled on Starfield models when textures are turned off.

NifSkope-2.0.dev9-20240428

• Reworked archive loading, added new file menu option to browse a game or archive folder.
• The archive browser now displays uncompressed file sizes from BA2 archives.
• Added support for version 7 and 8 BA2 archives used by the Fallout 4 next gen update.
• The glass settings added to version 21 Fallout 76 effect materials are now displayed under the material properties.
• Fixed unused BSShaderTextureSet blocks in Fallout 76 models being incorrectly added to the footer as root links.
• Fixed reading unknown fields from version 21 Fallout 76 effect materials.

NifSkope-2.0.dev9-20240422

• Implemented the Update Bounds and Update All Bounds mesh spells for Starfield. Casting these also updates the vertex and triangle counts on meshes.
• Updating the bounds of Fallout 76 shapes now also recalculates the bounding box.
• Fixed duplicate "Update Bounds" entries in the spells menu with models from Skyrim or newer games.
• Improved bounding sphere calculation, using code from Miniball by Martin Kutz, Kaspar Fischer and Bernd Gärtner.
• Implemented rendering Starfield and Fallout 76 bounding boxes and spheres.
• Added support for reading version 21 Fallout 76 material files. The new data fields (two texture paths and an unknown byte in effect materials) are currently ignored.
• Fixed emissive multiple controller on Fallout 76 materials.
• The "Max Filepath" header field is now read as an array of unknown bytes from Starfield NIF files, to avoid converting binary data to UTF-8 on saving the model.

NifSkope-2.0.dev9-20240412

• New spell for exporting the resource (geometry, material and texture) files used by the currently loaded model. It is available as an option in the right click menu on file paths, this extracts a single file, and in the main Spells menu to extract all resources required by the model. Note that files are extracted in the correct sub-folders (textures/, materials/, etc.) under the selected destination directory, and Starfield materials are automatically converted to JSON .mat format.
• New spell to replace all occurrences of a regular expression in resource paths that match a filter regular expression. It currently does not work on paths stored as header strings (like materials), and on abstract data loaded from external files.
• Resource settings now default to all games being enabled.
• The planar angle slider of the lighting widget can now be used in frontal light mode to rotate the environment map used by image based lighting.
• The PBR cube map resolution setting has a new maximum quality option that disables importance sampling at 512x512 resolution per face. Note: changes between the '512x512' and 'max. quality' modes may only take effect after restarting NifSkope if the texture is already cached.
• Fixed mip level calculation bug in importance sampled cube map filtering.
• Anti-aliasing is limited to a maximum of 4x on Linux to work around compatibility issues. Additionally, the calculation of sample count has been fixed so that it is set to 2, 4, 8 or 16 as displayed, instead of 1, 4, 9 or 16. The same change has also been applied to anisotropic filtering.
• Binary packages now include "noavx2" executables for better compatibility with older CPUs, including Ivy Bridge and AMD FX series.
• Fixed shader compilation error in fo4_effectshader.frag.

Note: running NifSkope under Wayland on Linux may require setting the QT_QPA_PLATFORM environment variable to "xcb" to work around compatibility issues.

NifSkope-2.0.dev9-20240331

Changes compared to the dev9 release from Sep 29, 2023:

• Support for rendering Starfield materials, with limitations: multiple layers are mostly unsupported, and translucency and many other advanced effects are not implemented. Materials can be loaded both from the compiled database (materialsbeta.cdb) and from loose .mat files, the latter is experimental.
• Image based lighting for Starfield and Fallout 76, can use DDS cube maps or Radiance HDR format images (available for example at Poly Haven, place the .hdr files in textures/cubemaps/ under a folder configured as a data path) as input. The resolution of the pre-filtered cube map and the paths to the textures can be set in the render options.
• Starfield height maps are implemented using parallax occlusion mapping, with new render settings for the height scale and maximum number of steps.
• Various rendering fixes for Fallout 76, and some for older games.
• Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76 and Starfield shaders have all been modified to use view space vectors instead of tangent space, similarly to the change described here. Skyrim parallax mapping has been updated as well to work correctly with this change.
• Improved physically based rendering for Fallout 76 (also used for Starfield), based on the models by Brian Karis and Brent Burley.
• Starfield and Fallout 76 material data loaded from external files is added as abstract data to the NIF model.
• New option in the Render menu (Alt+U) to flush cached textures, reload shaders, and update the display.
• The integer data (CRC32 of the material path) associated with Starfield materials is now recalculated on changes to the material path. Note that editing the path in the header strings may not automatically update this value and the display, use Update View (Alt+U) or toggle the grid on/off with G to force the update.
• The Edit String Index spell has a new button for browsing Starfield, Fallout 76 and Fallout 4 materials. Note: using this to swap materials leaves the previous paths as unused strings in the header, those can be cleaned up with 'Spells/Optimize/Remove Unused Strings' and then updating the view (Alt+U).
• The choose texture spell now browses all texture files available as resources, instead of the file system.
• New spell to export Starfield materials, it copies the material data from the selected BSLightingShaderProperty to the clipboard in JSON format.
• Improved lighting widget, with separate controls for the overall brightness and the intensity of directional and ambient light, and new sliders for tone mapping and the color temperature of the light source. There is also a new button for browsing the environment map (.dds or .hdr) used by Fallout 76 and Starfield image based lighting.
• Reworked resource manager, Fallout 3 and New Vegas have been merged in the resource settings to a single game mode, and removed the Archives tab. Resource data paths can now be folders (from which all archives and supported file types are loaded), single archives and loose files, and paths listed first have higher precedence. Note that a very large number of loose files may result in long load times.
• The location of the currently opened NIF file is automatically added as a temporary data path. Resources associated with the model can be in archives, or in loose files under the correct sub-directories (textures/, geometries/, etc.).
• Currently mapped resources can be released with Close Archives (Alt+Q) in the file menu. If a temporary data path is in use, only that is closed first.
• Fixed bugs in the screenshot dialog, including potential crash due to invalid memory access, and incorrect gamma on Fallout 76 and Starfield screenshots. JPEG files are also written with optimization and in progressive format, slightly reducing the file size at the same quality.
• Various other bug fixes, including to hexabits#51, hexabits#56, hexabits#61, hexabits#62, hexabits#64, hexabits#65, hexabits#67 (comment) and hexabits#74.