4.1.0-alpha.4

Needle Engine

• Add: SceneSwitcher methods for unload() and reload() the currently loaded scene

Unity Integration

• Add: FileReference types now have an option to be assigned from an asset in the scene, URL string or filepath string
• Change: Generated font assets are now cached
• Change: Attempt to auto recover corrupted npx cache

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Links

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4.1.0-alpha.1

Needle Engine

• Add: Support for loading KTX2 textures as environment-image and background-image (e.g. <needle-engine background-image="my-skybox.ktx2">)
• Fix: Issue where raycasting was not using acceleration structures and instead falling back to slow raycasting. This release greatly improves raycasting performance

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Links

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4.1.0-alpha

Needle Engine

• Add: Screenshot support for AR:
  To use you need to request the camera-access XR feature when starting a new XR session.
  For that you can either simply add the WebARCameraBackground component to your scene
  or add the feature in the NeedleXRSession.onSessionRequestStart event hook.

Unity Integration

• Add: Get AI Help for converting C# to typescript
  We added a small UI label above C# components that do not yet have a matching Needle Engine component. Clicking this label will ask the AI for how the component can be translated to typescript.
• Add: "Explain with AI" component context menu in Needle Engine/Explain with AI

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Links

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4.0.4-alpha

Needle Engine

• Fix: Detecting OBJ files starting with mtllib or content-type header model/obj
• Fix: Issue where screenshot() method with custom camera and postprocessing didn't work
• Update gltf-progressive package to load higher texture LODs by default

Unity Integration

• Add: NeedleCloudAsset component password field

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Links

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4.0.3-alpha

Needle Engine

• Add: OBJLoader now automatically loads mtl files
• Add: OBJLoader materials are now fixed like FBX materials

Unity Integration

• Add: NeedleCloudAsset component. Initial version to load Needle Cloud into the Unity Editor and Needle Engine runtime. To use just add the NeedleCloudAsset component to a GameObject in Unity.
• Fix: EDU license handling

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Links

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Needle Engine Blender Addon 0.52.1

• Fix: Issue where restarting the server would fail

🎯 Download Addon 💡 Download Samples

4.0.2-alpha

Needle Engine

• Add: Support for custom scripts on WebXR custom hands
• Fix: OrbitControls should not listen to window.body for key events

Unity Integration

• Add: Basic WebXR hand models and assign as default models in the XRControllerModel script

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Links

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4.0.1-alpha

Needle Engine

• Fix: Objects spawned with syncedInstantiate should automatically be removed when disconnecting from the networking room
• Fix: Issue where objects rendered with instancing enabled were not visible in screenshots

Unity Integration

• Change: Update Editor UI styles

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Links

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3.51.2

Unity Integration

• Fix: Don't show update dialogue for newly available alpha versions

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Links

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4.0.0-alpha

Needle Engine

• Add: Builds can now be compressed on Needle Cloud instead of locally. Set the NEEDLE_CLOUD_TOKEN environment variable to your Cloud access token to enable this. This allows running compression in CI build pipelines, for example in a Github Action. Needle Cloud access tokens can be obtained on https://cloud.needle.tools/team.
• Add: DropListener now optionally supports networking when allowNetworking is on. Dropped files will be network-synced if the file size does not exceed a certain size (50 MB for projects on paid plans; 5 MB for projects free plans).
• Fix: Previously, when changing a @syncField property, only the last changed property was synchronized to the server. This is now fixed. Note that this is a breaking change: previously networked server state with the @syncField attribute in Needle Engine 3.x projects will not be loaded in Needle Engine 4.0.
• Change: EventList now takes a generic type code hints when using myEventList.addEventListener(...) e.g. new EventList<string>()
• Change: The default networking server is now located at networking.needle.tools
• Change: The DropListener API has changed
• Change: OrbitControls useKeys is now false by default since the underlying three.js OrbitControls incorrectly capture ALL keyboard events on the page.
• Change: Loading speed improvements and improved Lighthouse score
• Change: md5 hashing results are now S3-compatible

Unity Integration

• Add: Projects can now be deployed to Needle Cloud directly from Unity. Needle Cloud supports build versioning, tagging, sharing and more. Learn more at https://cloud.needle.tools.
• Change: License authentication is now much easier and uses Needle Cloud authentication

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Links

Download for Unity • Download for Blender • Documentation • API • Live Samples