Due to the way the engine works it needs to render a lot of small primitives with frequent state changes.
But due to the performance of buffer uploads it is impossible to upload each primitive's vertices to a buffer separately because buffer uploads nearly always stall the GPU.
On the other hand, in order to reduce the amount of buffer uploads all the necessary state changes would have to be saved in an array until they can finally be used. This method also imposed an unacceptable overhead.
Fortunately, uploading uniform arrays is very fast and doesn't cause GPU stalls, so now the engine puts the vertex data per primitive into a uniform array and uses a static vertex buffer to index the array in the vertex shader.
This method offers the same performance as immediate mode but only uses core profile features.
- Also fixed some very strange thing in the shader's desaturate function. For unknown reasons using the 'mix' function there did not work.
- fixed: The fog boundary special shader could not be used.
Turns out that the name doesn't accurately describe what it does.
It is correct for images that come with their own palette or are true color.
But for images using the game palette it doesn't use the red channel to determine translucency but the palette index! Ugh...
This means it cannot be done with a simple operation in the shader because it won't get a proper source image. The only solution is to create a separate texture.
- remove thing color from lighting calculations.
- implement alpha textures and inverse sprites for infrared as texture modes. This still requires some handling for the alpha texture mode for non-shader rendering because there is no way in the fixed pipeline to do it. The inverted texture effect can be done with a texture combiner.
- fixed: ThingColor for sprites was set in the wrong place. It must be in the Process function, not in the lighting calculation.
- added functions for isolated calculation of sprites' dynlight color.
