Really, this won't make all that much difference because alias models
with more than one skin are quite rare, and those with animated skin
groups are even rarer. However, for those models that do have more than
one skin, it will allow for reduced allocation overheads, and when
supported (glsl, vulkan, maybe gl), loading all the skins into an array
texture (since all skins are the same size, though external skins may
vary), but that's not implemented yet, this just wraps the old one skin
at a time code.
This gets the alias pipeline in line with the bsp pipeline, and thus
everything is about as functional as it was before the rework (minus
dealing with large texture sets).
Multiple render passes are needed for supporting shadow mapping, and
this is a huge step towards breaking the Vulkan render free of Quake,
and hopefully will lead the way for breaking the GL renderers free as
well.
Quake just looked wrong without the view model. I can't say I like the
way the depth range is hacked, but it was necessary because the view
model needs to be processed along with the rest of the alias models
(didn't feel like adding more command buffers, which I imagine would be
expensive with the pipeline switching).
After getting lights even vaguely working for alias models, I realized
that it just wasn't going to be feasible to do nice lighting with
forward rendering. This gets the bulk of the work done for deferred
rendering, but still need to sort out the shaders before any real
testing can be done.
It's not quite as expected, but that may be due to one of msaa, the 0-15
range in the palette not being all the way to white, the color gradients
being not quite linear (haven't checked yet) or some combination of the
above. However, it's that what should be yellow is more green. At least
the zombies are no longer white and the ogres don't look like they're
wearing skeleton suits.
Doesn't seem to make much difference performance-wise, but speed does
seem to be fill-rate limited due to the 8x msaa. Still, it does mean
fewer bindings to worry about.