JaamSim 2026-03 released

[Harry King]

Changes in release 2026-03:

• Point-of-Interest. Zooming and orbiting actions with the mouse are centred on the point-of-interest in 3d space. The rules for setting this location have been refined to improve user experience. It is now set when an object is dragged-and-dropped, when it is dragged to a new position, and when it is right- or left-clicked. The point-of-interest is unchanged by a right- or left-click when no object is under the cursor. However, when the coordinate grid is visible, the 'XY-Grid' object provides an object on the xy-plane to be detected by a mouse click. Formerly, the point-of-interest would be set by default to the point on the xy-plane that was under the cursor when no object was present. For 3d models located far from the xy-plane, this behaviour could cause large unwanted movements of the view camera for zooming and orbiting which required the user to click the undo button to restore the view. 
• 'XY-Grid object'. This existing object, which displays the coordinate grid on the xy-plane, has been changed to use a ShapeModel instead of a ColladaModel to provide its graphics. A new 'GRID' option has been added to the 'Shape' input for ShapeModel for this purpose. A new feature is that the background colour and transparency for the XY-Grid object can be set using the FillColour input for the 'Grid100x100' ShapeModel. This input is set to 'white 0', indicating a white colour with 100% transparency so that it is not visible, but is detected by a mouse click. Models created with earlier versions of JaamSim can still be loaded into this version.
• 'ViewDirection' input. This input for the View object sets the direction of its camera. Formerly, the 'ViewCenter' input was used for this purpose. Models created with earlier versions of JaamSim can still be loaded into this version.
• Astronomical distances. The 3d graphics code has been refined to work correctly for the enormous distances required by astronomical models. Objects separated by a distance of up to 100 billion light-years can be displayed together.
• Internal improvements. The code for view cameras and rendering has been streamlined.

Harry