Sponsored by the Blender Development Fund.
http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/development-fund/
Remarks:
The original code was not designed to support moving obstacles so I had to introduce some velocity constraints into the code to prevent smoke from exploding. If this causes problems with "fire" emulation, please let me know.
* Massive reorganization of pointcache code, things are now cleaner than ever.
* For all but smoke the cache is first written to memory when using disk cache and after that written to disk in one operation. This allows less disk operations and the possibility to compress the data before writing it to disk.
* Previously only smoke cache could be compressed, now the same options exist for other physics types too (when using disk cache). For now the default compression option is still "no compression", but if there aren't any problems this can be set to "light compression" as it's actually faster than no compression in most cases since there's less data to write to the disk. Based on quick tests heavy compression can reduce the file size down to 1/3rd of the original size, but is really slow compared to other options, so it should be used only if file size is critical!
* The pointcache code wasn't really 64bit compatible (for disk cache) until now, so this update should fix some crashes on 64bit builds too. Now all integer data that's saved to disk uses 32 bit unsigned integers, so simulations done on 64bit should load fine on 32bit machines and vice versa. (Important disk cache simulations made on 64bit builds should be converted to memory cache in a revision before this commit).
* There are also the beginnings of extradata handling code in pointcache in anticipation of adding the dynamic springs for particle fluids (the springs need to be stored as extradata into point cache).
* Particles were being read from the cache with a slightly wrong framerate. In most cases this probably wasn't noticeable, but none the less the code is now correct in every way.
* Small other fixes here and there & some cosmetic changes to cache panel, but over all there should be no functional changes other than the new disk cache compression options.
* This whole re-organization also seems to fix bug #25436 and hopefully shouldn't introduce any new ones!
* Pointcache code was quite ugly looking and complicated, so here are mostly just cosmetic adjustments, but some improved logic also.
* Slight cleanup of pointcache ui too.
* Shouldn't have any functional changes what so ever, so poke me right away if something seems off.
* Depsgraph wasn't updated properly for smoke flow collision object dependencies.
* Smoke also wasn't properly using the actual emission frame of the flow particles.
* There was a lot of bloated logic in some parts of particle code so this fix turned into a small scale cleanup operation.
** As a result particle updating and cache usage should be a bit more stable too.
* Separate caches were causing quite a lot of problems both in principle and practice.
* For example it doesn't really make sense to have different frame ranges for normal and high resolution smoke, but this was fully possible before.
* Also to fully bake the smoke you had to do a "Bake All Dynamics", which completely defeats the whole point of the feature!
* As a result of this change the smoke cache usage is much much simpler and less error prone.
* This is quite a big change, but hopefully there should be less rather than more problems as a result :)
Some other related changes:
* Changing the cache name now works for disk caches properly too, it now just renames the cache files so should be faster too!
* Smoke is now always forced to disk cache with step 1 on file load as there were some strange cases where smoke was trying to use memory cache.
* Disabled smoke debug prints from console.
* Disabled changing smoke parameters when smoke is baked.
Note to users: The unfortunate side effect of this is that old high resolution simulations have to be baked again, but in return you get much better and more logical functionality. Sorry none the less!
