It's currently used only by the vulkan renderer, as it's the only
renderer that can make good use of it for alias models, but now vulkan
show shirt/pants colors (finally).
Well, sort of: it's still really in the renderer, but now calling
R_AddEfrags automatically updates the visibility structure as necessary,
and deleting an entity cleans up the efrags automatically. I wanted this
over twenty years ago.
While an entity with a null registry is null regardless of the id,
setting the id to nullent is useful for other purposes.
Fixes the disappearing brush models in the vulkan renderer (it uses
entity id + 1 for indexing), and prevents similar issues in the future.
This puts the hierarchy (transform) reference, animation, visibility,
renderer, active, and old_origin data in separate components. There are
a few bugs (crashes on grenade explosions in gl/glsl/vulkan, immediately
in sw, reasons known, missing brush models in vulkan).
While quake doesn't really need an ECS, the direction I want to take QF
does, and it does seem to have improved memory bandwidth a little
(uncertain). However, there's a lot more work to go (especially fixing
the above bugs), but this seems to be a good start.
This allows the use of an entity id to index into the entity data and
fetch the transform and colormod data in the vertex shader, thus making
instanced rendering possible. Non-world brush entities are still not
rendered, but the world entity is using both the entity data buffer and
entid buffer.
The main goal was to get visframe out of mnode_t to make it thread-safe
(each thread can have its own visframe array), but moving the plane info
into mnode_t made for better data access patters when traversing the bsp
tree as the plane is right there with the child indices. Nicely, the
size of mnode_t is the same as before (64 bytes due to alignment), with
4 bytes wasted.
Performance-wise, there seems to be very little difference. Maybe
slightly slower.
The unfortunate thing about the change is the plane distance is negated,
possibly leading to some confusion, particularly since the box and
sphere culling functions were affected. However, this is so point-plane
distance calculations can be done with a single 4d dot product.
I meant to do this a while ago but forgot about it. Things are a bit of
a mess in that the renderer knows too much about entities, but
eventually the renderer will know about only things to render (meshes,
particles, etc).
While there's currently only the one still, this will allow the entities
to be multiply queued for multi-pass rendering (eg, shadows). As the
avoidance of putting an entity in the same queue more than once relies
on the entity id, all entities now come from the scene (which is stored
in cl_world in the client code for nq and qw), thus the extensive
changes in the clients.