Major features and improvements:

• Introduced GFX Replay feature. Save graphical replays and play them back. Reproduce earlier observations or produce new observations from different camera positions. (#1049, #983)
• Now supporting Physically Based Rendering (PBR) with point and directional lights. Supports metallic-roughness models specified in glTF 2.0., normal maps, normal texture scale, emissive textures, packed textures, texture transformation, double-sided objects, etc... (#837, #840, #863, #889, #895, #898, #902)
• Introduced new cubemap render camera type (#1000)
• Added Orthographic projection mode and zoom to CameraSensor. (#933)
• Introduced the MetaDataMediator class and SceneDataset concept to manage all metadata used to describe simulator, object, stage, lighting, and scene configuration. Includes JSON configuration framework and parsing (specs) and a programmatic configuration API in both C++ and python(attributes|managers|metadata). (#862, #818, #817, #819, #852, #869, #879, #881, #883, #885, #897, #917, #928, #923, #990)
• Added a flag to enable/disable collisions for objects and stages. (#932)

Other improvements and bug fixes:

• Various improvements to viewer application:

  • Screenshots now automatically routed to new output directory each time viewer is run. (#807)
  • SPACE toggles dynamic simulation and '.' takes single steps. (#887)
  • Added objects now set to agent orientation. (#887)
  • Keyboard control of agent movement is now continuous instead of discrete. (#1013)
  • Added per-frame profiling overlay. (#1015, #1039)
  • Handle mouse scroll+shift for mac (#1040)
  • Integrated GFX Replay recording with 'r'. (#1001)

• Added JSON reading and writing in C++ with serialization for most Magnum types and some user types. (#980)

• Removed SceneConfiguration functionality absorbed into new MetadataMediator. (#906)

• Moved SimulatorConfiguration to its own source files. (#815)

• Various bug fixes, including:

  • Pytest crash when habitat-sim and habitat-lab were installed in the same directory. (#908)
  • STATIC objects now have properly configured friction, restitution, and damping. (#846)
  • Fixed issue with MP3D bounding box loading. (#832)
  • Use normal matrix in GenericDrawable. (#838)
  • Correctly use flags to setup shader values in GenericDrawable. (#876)
  • Fix ptex assertion. (#939)
  • Update sensor enums from all-caps to Pascal style. (#1009)
  • Fix configuration edge case in renderer creation logic. (#962)
  • MotionType::UNKOWN changed to UNDEFINED with value -1. (#861)

Corresponding Habitat-Lab v0.1.7 release.

Kudos to our community contributors: @mpiseno @mwouts