For now, only the glsl loader disables caching, but it stores the frame
vertices in GL memory, so its hunk usage is relatively lower (and will be
lower still when I get skins sorted out).
Unfortunately, the intel driver on my eeepc doesn't like the mipmas for
plat_top2 or +2floorsw. If I either don't load their mipmaps, or skip
drawing them, things seem to work nicely.
It turns out my complicated plan was just that: complicated. Although there
are currently some bugs, the method I used to build the VBO in the first
place will work equally well for building the index lists.
The entire vertex set from every model is put into one list (not yet
uploaded). chains of elements arrays are build for non-instanced models
(instanced models will have their chains built each frame).
Still nothing being rendered: still in the process of building the display
lists, but I'm making good progress. Get this into git before something
goes wrong :)
After getting in contact with serplord, I now know that the sw alias
loading was correct. Turns out the gl loaders was mostly correct, just a
mistaken subtract rather than add. And with that, I can implement alias-16
support in glsl. better yet, since all the work is done in the loader, the
renderer doesn't know anything about it :) However, I need to create some
16-bit models for testing.
Not all hardware can access a texture sampler from the vertex shader, and I
don't want multiple paths this early in the game. Now, vertex normals are
uploaded as shorts. Should be 14 bytes per vertex (was 10, could have been
8 if I had put the normal index with the vertex rather than st).
GL Quake was weird, culling front faces. Partly understandable, since
Quake's front order is clockwise and GL's default order is
counter-clockwise. However, since the order can be specified, that should
be done instead. Thus, specify the winding order as clockwise (for quake's
data), set culling for back-face removal, and then mess with the winding
direction in the mirror and fish-eye code.
Vertex locations need to be unsigned byte rather than byte (GL is funy
with that). s and t need to be at least short, and since the normal index
is embedded in the st vector, it needs to be the same type. With this, my
test tetrahedrons seem to be working.
The plan is to do interpolated sprites based on a discussion I had with
LordHavoc about them: blending between the two sprite frames. He didn't
mention it, but it looks like blending between the sprite frames' verts is
necessary too.