rgl 0.109.2

This is a fairly large update, fixing a lot of bugs and adding a number of new features.

Major changes

• Changes to support glTF animation:
  • Handling of embedding = "modify" for the model matrix
    has changed. Now the centering step is only done for
    embedding = "replace". In addition, various bugs
    have been fixed.
  • If a subscene has no lights defined, the lights from the parent
    are used.
  • plot.rglscene() now ends with the root subscene as
    current. It also allows specification of open3d()
    parameters in a list.
  • The MATn types in Buffer are returned as arrays with
    dim c(n, n, count).
  • The plot3d.rglscene method now passes ... to open3d().
  • The setUserShaders() function now allows arrays of 4x4 matrices as "uniforms", and allows additional textures to be specified.
• sprites3d() now has the option of
  rotating = TRUE, to allow 3D sprites to rotate with
  the scene.
• Added getShaders() function to get shaders used in WebGL.
• Now detects if rgl is running within reprex::reprex()
  and if so arranges that a screenshot will be included in the
  output.
• Added default shaders to be used in rglwidget(), rather than
  constructing them on the fly. This incompatibly affects the use
  of lights and clipping planes with user shaders: their data
  is now stored in arrays rather than multiple numbered variables.

Minor changes

• Now that pkgdown 2.0.0 has been released, a number
  of internal workarounds to support the development version
  have been removed.
• Added as.mesh3d() methods for "rglsubscene" and "rglscene".
• open3d() now handles useNULL and silent arguments
  passed in params.
• Controls passed to playwidget() may now include a
  component specifying HTML dependencies.
• Added rglwidgetClass.readAccessor() method to let other
  code use the buffering.
• Changed the internal organization of bounding box calculations.
• All functions that produce meshes now accept
  material properties. Newly modified to do so using the ...
  argument: cylinder3d(), and getBoundary3d().
• Updated the system requirements and installation instructions.
• Solid bounding box decorations now try harder to display 3 faces (issue #206).
• Now that webshot2 is on CRAN, instructions for
  installing it from Github have been removed.
• Sometimes webshot2 snapshots are very slow, so
  the default for the webshot argument to snapshot3d()
  now depends on the RGL_USE_WEBSHOT environment
  variable, using TRUE if it is unset. (Reported by Prof. B. D. Ripley.)
• If the Chrome browser is not found, snapshot3d(webshot = TRUE) now issues a warning and
  reverts to using rgl.snapshot().
• Buffers now use "normalized integers" to store
  color or texture coordinate values that lie between 0
  and 1 when it saves some space.
• At the request of CRAN, the akima package is no
  longer suggested.

Bug fixes

• as.mesh3d.rglobject() didn't handle objects with indices
  properly.
• In WebGL, the front vs back calculation sometimes
  got the wrong result (issue #164).
• pop3d(tag = x) did not always find the objects with tag == x if they were not in the current subscene.
• The default values for front and back in rgl.material
  and material3d are now "filled", as documented in some
  places.
• The fog setting wasn't handled properly by bg3d().
• Numerous cases of partial argument matching were fixed
  (suggestion of Henrik Bengtsson in issue #170.)
• Argument col is accepted as a synonym for color in material3d() and rgl.material().
• planes3d() objects were not displayed consistently
  in rgl windows and WebGL displays, because the bounding
  boxes were not computed consistently (issue #169).
• Some initialization wasn't done properly in Shiny apps,
  so they failed after a redraw (issue #173).
• Buffers are now optional, as they don't work with
  Shiny scene changes (also issue #173).
• The NULL device would sometimes miscalculate the
  bounding box.
• selectpoints3d(closest = TRUE) selected too many points
  when multiple objects were in the scene.
• Clearing nested subscenes could cause a segfault and crash.
• In knitr and rmarkdown, blank plots could be shown
  when par3d(skipRedraw=TRUE) was set (issue #188).
• Objects drawn with sprites3d() weren't lit correctly
  in WebGL (issue #189).
• Objects with textures were sometimes drawn more than once, both
  before the texture loaded and after. This was most noticeable for
  objects with user textures.
• Axis mode "pretty" got lost when scenes were redrawn.
• Tick labels were sometimes lost in WebGL displays and
  snapshot3d() results (issue #197).
• The new material properties from 0.107.10 and 0.108.3
  were not handled properly by plotmath3d().
• rglMouse() did not set the default value of the drop-down
  selector properly (issue #213).
• merge.mesh3d(), used by filledContour3d(), didn't handle
  colors properly (issue #212).
• bg3d(sphere = TRUE) has been fixed (issue #207).
• Textures were not appearing on spheres, and front-back
  differences weren't being rendered (issue #217).
• When "knitting" within RStudio under R 4.2.0 on
  Windows, rgl scenes didn't appear (reported by
  Dieter Menne.) A workaround has been added.
• In rglwidget(), axis labels were not always
  displayed, and did not move with solid bounding box
  decorations properly (issue #206).
• On some systems, lines3d() using both missing values
  and transparency did not draw properly (issue #234,
  originally reported by Gaspar Jekely).
• The rglShared() example failed when crosstalk
  was uninstalled.

rgl 0.108.3

Major changes

• Added getBoundary3d() function to extract the boundary
  edges of a mesh.
• Added material property tag, a string associated
  with each object. The value is reported by ids3d(tags = TRUE) and
  may be used to select objects in most functions that use ids,
  but otherwise is
  largely ignored by rgl. The tagged3d() function returns
  information on tags.
• Primitive types (points, lines, segments, triangles, quads)
  can now accept an indices parameter, similar to the
  indices in mesh3d objects.
• Added Buffer object, based on glTF design, for holding binary
  data for rglwidget().

Minor changes

• Allowed for a third coordinate in text3d()'s adj
  parameter.
• Added support for adj, pos and offset to
  sprites3d().
• Added support for pos values of 0 (at specified
  location), 5 (in front of it), and 6 (behind it) in
  text3d(), sprites3d() and plotmath3d().
• crosstalk is now a Suggested package, rather than
  a required one.
• The Makevars.ucrt file has been modified with
  contributions from Tomas Kalibera to work with his winutf8
  build of R.
• bgplot3d() no longer pauses for each page when running
  examples.
• deldir version 1.0-2 is incompatible with rgl. Added
  the checkDeldir() function to avoid running it.
• shade3d() treated texture coordinates like colors, and
  duplicated the first one for the whole face when meshColor = "faces" was chosen.
  Instead, they are now treated like vertex coordinates.
  (Reported by Michael Sumner in issue #145).
• Corrected the documentation and made the implementations
  of asHomogeneous(), asEuclidean() etc. more consistent.
• An as.rglscene() generic has been added, though no methods
  are defined in this package.
• downlit 0.4.0 has been released with support for rgl, so instructions
  for installing the devel version have been removed.

Bug fixes

• Fixed rendering of text as sprites3d() objects.
• Added --static flag to configure script for FreeType
  installation. (Suggestion of Simon Urbanek and Prof. Brian Ripley.)
• shade3d(), wire3d() and dots3d() overrode
  "front" and "back" material settings in mesh objects.
• rglwidget() handling of bounding box decorations had
  several bugs.
• rgl could not find routines in the DLL on some Windows
  installs (Issue 148.)
• Some cases where allocations were not protected have been fixed.

rgl 0.107.14

Major changes

• Added expect_known_scene() function to work with
  testthat.
• Added some testthat tests.
• Prepend a 5th entry to par3d("mouseMode"), corresponding
  to actions to take when no button is pressed.
• Allowed any of the mouse modes to be applied to
  the mouse wheel.
• Added the setUserCallbacks() function to allow
  user-specified mouse callbacks in WebGL code.
• Added Javascript code for support of movable
  axis labels in bboxdeco objects.
• Most drawing functions can now draw in the margins
  using new material properties margin and floating,
  with objects that move as the bounding box changes.
  See ?mtext3d for details.
• The mtext3d() argument order has changed.
• Added the setAxisCallbacks() function to allow
  user-specified axis drawing routines.
• Exposed (and generalized) the as.tmesh3d() function.

Minor changes

• The shiny and manipulateWidget packages have been changed from imports
  that are always loaded to suggested packages that
  will only be loaded if needed. This will reduce the
  "footprint" of rgl for users who don't use them.
• The NULL device can now specify par3d("useFreeType")
  and the result is saved.
• Code to work with pre-1.33 versions of knitr has now
  been removed.
• Added documentation of Javascript to web page.
• The handling of the RGL_DEBUGGING environment variable
  has changed: now it must look like TRUE to trigger
  Javascript debugging mode.
• Argument webshot = TRUE has been added to movie3d (issue #113).
• The assert() macro is now always defined.
• In Windows, the WM_PAINT handler should be more tolerant
  of code called while painting.
• as.mesh3d.default() can create segments. (Contributed
  by Michael Sumner.)
• compare_proxy.mesh3d() has been modified to be
  compatible with both current and upcoming versions of
  waldo.

Bug fixes

• The bug workaround in 0.105.22 for issue #27 triggered a bug
  in RStudio, resulting in two RStudio processes showing up
  when rgl was loaded. The workaround is now skipped when
  RStudio is detected. Use options(startQuartz = TRUE)
  in RStudio before loading rgl to run it,
  or options(startQuartz = FALSE) to suppress it.
• In some cases, snapshots in rmarkdown documents
  were produced at the wrong size.
• Controls failed to modify sphere colors (e.g. as in example(playwidget), issue #102)