What’s new in SOFA v20.06

New: SofaDefrost plugins integration

SoftRobots

This plugin contains components dedicated to soft robotics.
It provides models for cable and pneumatic actuations, tools to define trajectories for the robot’s end effector, or tools to communicate with microcontroller boards.

See SoftRobots repository for details.

ModelOrderReduction

This plugin contains components with python utilitaries allowing to perform model reduction and use these reduced model easily in a SOFA scene.

See ModelOrderReduction repository for details.

Breaking: BaseClass reflection

A lot of work has been done to simplify and clean all SOFA introspection API:

Move name decoding aspect in a separated file called NameDecoder.h
Remove duplicated custom template name
Removal of nullptr in className, templateName, typeName

SOFA codebase has been updated accordingly and, for now, the old functions are still available with a deprecated message.
All instructions to update your code are in the pull-request description.

See pull-request #1283.

Improved: Architecture

As always, architecture has been improved towards modularity and easier deployment.

SofaComponent* “meta” packages have been removed. Usual packages like SofaGeneral can be used instead.
See pull-request #1314.
SofaGui modules have been moved to modules.
See pull-request #1397.
SofaNonUniformFem and SofaValidation have been modularized.

See pull-requests #1344 and #1302.

Breaking: Eigen3 auto-fetch

Eigen3 auto-fetch in sources has been removed. It caused problems when an external program tried to compile with both SOFA and another version of Eigen.

Now, SOFA relies on the standard find_package(Eigen3). Users and developpers must install Eigen on their machine.

See pull-request #1281.