2026-08-09

[markaren]

This release includes various fixes and polishing after yesterdays major release.

The robot can see: a colour camera sensor (#409)

A new sensor type beside the depth camera and LIDAR — the one that produces a
picture, which is what a wrist camera publishes and a perception policy
consumes. Author it on a Camera object — the next section is why — and read it
from a Play script:

cam = editor.camera_from_object(self.tool)
if cam and cam.frames > self.last:
    self.last = cam.frames
    msg.data = cam.image          # RGB8, row-major, top-left origin
    msg.width, msg.height = cam.width, cam.height

cam.image is exactly what sensor_msgs/Image with encoding="rgb8" wants —
no flip, no conversion — and cam.time is on the same sim clock as every other
sensor's measurements. Record writes one PNG per frame plus an index CSV: a
dataset, not a plot. Raster backends; on Vulkan the sensor reports an honest
status instead of a wrong picture.

Aiming a sensor is aiming a camera

The wrist camera exposed the friction the moment it worked: a pinhole sensor
looks down its −Z, and rotating a host object by degrees until an invisible
frustum points the right way is authoring blind. So the two pinhole sensors —
Depth and Camera — now author on a real PerspectiveCamera node, and
everything a camera already has becomes the sensor's: the gizmo aims it, the
frustum helper shows the cone, and the camera dock previews exactly what it
will record — live, in edit mode, before Play is ever pressed.

One consequence worth knowing: the camera's FOV/near/far are now the frustum's
single source of truth. They are edited in the Camera section, the sensor
section shows them read-only, and Play builds the scan from the camera itself —
a stale copy in a saved document cannot out-vote it.

Old scenes keep playing; the gate is authoring-side only. A vision sensor
found on a plain object gets a one-click Move To Camera Child: the config
crosses whole, the camera is stamped from the authored numbers, the child sits
at the host's origin so the aim survives to the millimetre, and the whole move
is one undo step. The LIDAR stays on a plain node — 360 degrees has no frustum
for a camera to be the truth of.

The chrome moved into the viewport

The toolbar row is gone, and the hierarchy and inspector run the full height
from the menu bar to the status bar. What the bar held became viewport
furniture, drawn with the view gizmo's brush — vector sprites on the
background draw list, no textures, the same picture on either backend, crisp
at any DPI:

• Tool palette, top-left: Select, Move, Rotate, Scale, the local/world
  toggle and Snap as icon buttons, active tool on the accent, tooltips
  carrying the W/E/R/Q keys.
• Transport pill, top-centre: Play, Pause, Stop. The running state lives
  on the buttons — green under Play while the clock runs, amber under Pause
  while it holds — so the old PLAY banner is gone; the pill says it.
• Viewpoint picker, docked under the view gizmo: the same axis presets
  and orthographic toggle, in the corner that already answers "where am I
  standing".

During Play the whole palette sleeps, Snap included — nothing it controls can
act while the gizmo is parked. Shift stays the hold-to-snap override.

The gripper is scriptable: runtime joints (#408)

grip = editor.create_joint(part, self.tool, position=part.get_world_position())
...
grip.release()

Build a constraint mid-Play between any two of: a scene object (including any
link of a simulated robot — resolved by the same rule an authored joint node
uses), an editor.RigidBody, an ArticulationLink, or the world. The part
stays a real dynamic body throughout — it keeps its mass and its contacts,
where the old workaround (reparenting) teleported it out of the simulation.
The session owns the joint, so Stop tears it down in the right order however
long a script keeps the handle, and release() wakes both sides so the part
actually falls.

Scripts can light a scene (#410)

The editor's embedded module now carries the loaders — RGBELoader,
EXRLoader, TextureLoader, ModelLoader and friends — so a script can
build a texture and assign scene.environment instead of that being a
UI-only action. Headless runs get the same power as --environment=PATH.

Python can open what the editor saves

ModelLoader routed every interchange format and answered "unsupported
extension" to .json — the one format this project's own File → Save writes.
One dispatch branch closes it everywhere at once: wheel, editor scripts,
load_async. The document root is adopted as the group's child, never
unwrapped, so a Scene root keeps its environment, fog and userData.

A URDF that will not load says why

URDFLoader.load/parse raised "failed to parse URDF XML" and threw away the
message that names the file, the line, and the symbol it could not resolve.
Now the exception is the diagnosis — which matters most on
/robot_description, where the XML never touched a disk:

URDFLoader: arm.urdf.xacro:4: undefined name 'reach' (in expression "reach")

loader.last_error and loader.diagnostics are readable afterwards, and the
warnings a successful xacro expansion produces (a redefined macro, an ignored
attribute) reach both Python and the editor console instead of only stderr.
load_articulation and the editor's own robot import carry the same account.

Files find their classes (#411)

stage_look.py holding class StageLook is the ordinary way to write Python,
and the lookup treated it as a non-match. Case and punctuation are now folded
on both sides — stage_look / stage-look / StageLook / stageLook are one
name — with the literal match still first, so nothing that resolved before
resolves differently. Setup scripts that only implement start() are found
too, and the errors name the classes that exist plus a spelling that would
match.

And the rest

• PhysX articulations honour the document's xacro arguments (A xacro robot renders correctly but cannot be simulated: loadArticulation drops the xacro args #406) — a
  parameterised robot simulates as the robot on screen, not as the file's
  defaults.
• Referenced images load the way they were saved (ObjectLoader decodes images with flipY hardcoded to false, so a document's environment map loads upside down #407) — an
  ImageStorage::Reference document no longer round-trips every texture
  upside down.
• Vulkan headless-surface mode — display-less machines get
  VK_EXT_headless_surface with a hidden-window fallback where the ICD lacks
  it.
• GLFW 3.4 platform-API guard for external-GLFW builds.
• Clearer collider error messages; editor.scene() correctly typed as
  Scene in the stubs.

Closes #406, #407, #408, #409, #410, #411.

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This discussion was created from the release 2026-08-09.