Now, compositing, shading and texture nodes have a consistent muting system, with default behaving as previous (for compo), and which can be optionaly customized by each node.
Shader nodes are also GLSL muted.
However, Cycles is currently unaware of muted nodes, will try to address this…
This prevents access to non-existent typeinfo during type initialization,
when node types have been removed and such nodes are deleted from older files.
All blenkernel functions now only set the node->update flag instead of directly
calling the update function. All operators, etc. calling blenkernel functions
to modify nodes should make a ntreeUpdate call afterward (they already did that
anyway).
Editor/RNA/renderer/etc. high-level functions still can do immediate updates by
using nodeUpdate and nodeUpdateID (replacing NodeTagChanged/NodeTagIDChanged
respectively). These old functions were previously used only for setting
compositor node needexec flags and clearing cached data, but have become generic
update functions that require type-specific functionality (i.e. a valid typeinfo
struct).
This would previously break because begin/end functions for each tree type still have some checks of the ntree->execdata pointer in them, despite the intended use of execdata instances instead of trees themselves for execution data storage. This is an artifact of the old execution system that required these checks to be made in the functions to avoid multiple execution of top-level trees. Now these functions take an additional argument, so group nodes can prevent them from setting and checking the nodetree->execdata pointers.
This branch adds mostly organizational improvements to the node system by renaming the node folders and files. A couple of internal features have been added too.
Detailed information can be found on the wiki page:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Phonybone/Particles2010