This seems to have been an optimization for QW since standard qw removed
monsters. However, since there are QW mods that brought back monsters,
this should be an improvement.
This has several benifits:
o The silly issue with alias model pitches being backwards is kept out
of the renderer (it's a quakec thing: entites do their pitch
backwards, but originally, only alias models were rotated. Hipnotic
did brush entity rotations in the correct direction).
o Angle to frame vector conversions are done only when the entity's
angles vector changes, rather than every frame. This avoids a lot of
unnecessary trig function calls.
o Once transformed, an entity's frame vectors are always available.
However, the vectors are left handed rather than right handed (ie,
forward/left/up instead of forward/right/up): just a matter of
watching the sign. This avoids even more trig calls (flag models in
qw).
o This paves the way for merging brush entity surface rendering with the
world model surface rendering (the actual goal of this patch).
o This also paves the way for using quaternions to represent entity
orientation, as that would be a protocol change.
After discussing things with Spike of FTE, it seems that not many clients
handle zero length mvd packets particularly well. While it the skip code
might be useful for qtv, getting the packets into one but not the other
seems to be not worth the effort at this stage.
There are some problems with menus and the console messing up the key_dest
state (they assume console/menu or game, nothing else), but otherwise
things seem to work.
I got rather tired of there being multiple definitions of mostly compatible
plane types (and I need a common type anyway). dplane_t still exists for
now because I want to be careful when messing with the actual bsp format.
Same as the rotating entities in NQ. Unfortunately, I have some problems
with certain entities doing really weird things during collisions. I'll
sort that out later.
It seems that QW already allowed explode-box jumping, but this makes code a
little more consistent. Still need to figure out what to do about the
player physics code: the client prediction is wrong, though the server gets
it right (before the change).
This also makes functionality consistent across the platforms, such as
adding support for -dedicated to sdl based nq, and various timing
calculations are now consistent.
Bill Currie
Antti Harri