v0.4.0

This release completes the migration to Quadrants, our own high-performance cross-platform compiler which originally started as a fork of the official Taichi project back in May and has now sufficiently diverged to be renamed. Beyond that, this release polishes the newly introduced USD parser and the external interactive viewer plugin mechanism. Finally, the performance of the simulation has been significantly improved for collision-heavy scenes (up to 30%) and robots using capsule/sphere collision geometries (up to 20%).

Breaking changes

• Migrate from GsTaichi to Quadrants. (@hughperkins, @duburcqa) (#2399, #2409)

New Features

• Replace partial broken Vulkan backend by (experimental) AMD ROCm backend. (@duburcqa) (#2393, #2402)
• Support ArticulationRoot-free robots and instanced prims in USD. (@alanray-tech) (#2411)
• Add KinematicContactProbe sensor. (@Milotrince) (#2389)
• Add support of USD in 'gs view'. (@duburcqa) (#2423)
• Add IPC Robot-Cloth Coupling. (@Roushelfy, @alanray-tech) (#2427, #2352)

Bug Fixes

• Fix weld and connect equality constraints. (@duburcqa) (#2390)
• Fix color overwrite for primitive geometries in URDF. (@duburcqa) (#2403)
• Fix merging chained fixed links. (@duburcqa) (#2404, #2429)
• Fix handling of unspecified spatial inertia properties in USD. (@alanray-tech) (#2401)
• Tune GJK to avoid false negative collision detection. (@SonSang) (#2419)
• Fix object slowly falling when holding object using mouse interaction plugin. (@Milotrince) (#2418)
• Fix interactive viewer deadlock on Wayland. (@alexis779) (#2422)
• Fix default file extension for interactive viewer save. (@duburcqa) (#2424)
• Fix viewer raycast kernel compilation race condition. (@duburcqa) (#2430)

Miscellaneous

• Speed up linesearch via reducing global reads by recomputing quad. (@erizmr) (#2384)
• Speed up capsule-capsule and capsule-sphere collision detection. (@hughperkins) (#2363, #2413, #2414)
• Lazy-initialize SDF pre-processing in RigidGeom. (@duburcqa) (#2392)
• Add uv installation instructions to translated READMEs. (@antoinedandi) (#2416)
• Fix support of fastcache for raycast kernels. (@duburcqa) (#2417)