What’s new in SOFA v18.12

Breaking: DataEngine, Data tracking, Data updates

Efforts have been made on making DataEngine and Data tracking easier to use.

A new implementation of DataEngine hides the code related to updating datafields and calling cleanDirty(). This replacement requires every Engine to:
- replace its update() method with the new delegate doUpdate()
- remove the calls to data.isDirty() and (smartly) replacing them with m_dataTracker.isDirty(data)
- remove the cleanDirty() calls while making sure to not break the engine’s behavior
DataTrackerDDGNode::isDirty() method has been renamed to hasChanged() to reduce confusion with BaseData::isDirty()

See #760, #814, #822.

Breaking: Mass homogenization

Multiple breaking changes were made to mass components to make them more understandable:

unify the naming of datafields (vertexMass, massDensity and totalMass)
unify initialization processes
apply the coding rules (especially regarding the variable prefix d_ and m_) and use the msg API
add the feature of dataTracker on the data for mass information
add support for additional CUDA templates for the MeshMatrixMass (that should always be preferred as default mass)

See #637.

Fixed: misc

Collaborative work with InSimo
See #756.

Segfault with static analyzers on MacOS
See #642.

Bug in Quater::toEulerVector()
See #399.

SparseGridTopology initialization
See #670.

Improved: Doc

Documentation “Main Principles” category has been greatly improved with new pages about Integration schemes, solvers, collision, constraints and more.

See Main Principles documentation.

Improved: Multithreading

The Multithreading plugin has been cleaned and improved.

TaskScheduler API has been moved to SOFA core to allow different scheduling strategies.
Default implementation: DefaultTaskScheduler (C++11) using a stack of tasks (LIFO).
FreeMotionAnimationLoop is parallelized (not completely).

See Multithreading pull-requests.