This was done to clean up the license and to ensure that any commercial fork of the engine has to obey the far stricter requirements concerning source distribution. The old license was compatible with GPLv2 whereas combining GPLv2 and LGPLv3 force a license upgrade to GPLv3. The license of code that originates from ZDoomGL has not been changed.
Both of these were inherited from ZDoomGL and in terms of light design in maps it makes absolutely no sense to have them user configurable. They should have been removed 11 years ago.
- restricted gl_lights_additive to legacy code and removed menu entry for this.
For modern hardware this setting is completely pointless, it offers no advantage and degrades visual quality. Its only reason for existence was that drawing additive lights with textures is a lot faster, and that's all it's being used for now.
It makes no sense having them organized differently in this struct than what the rendering code needs. This saves one redundant copy operation and a function-local static variable.
- fixed: untextured walls should never be passed to SplitWall.
- fixed: untextured walls should not be affected by dynamic lights (it's either fog boundaries or outsides of 3D fog volumes.)
- avoid rebinding the same texture multiple times, as there's considerable overhead in the texture manager.
- check gl_sort_textures only once per scene, not per draw list.
- use sampler objects to avoid creating up to 4 different system textures for one game texture just because of different clamping settings.
- avoids flushing all textures for change of texture filter mode.
- separate sprite and regular dimensions on the material level to have better control over which one gets used. It's now an explicit parameter of ValidateTexture. The main reason for this change is better handling of wall sprites which may not be subjected to such handling.
- create mipmaps based on use case, not texture type.
- allows removal of FCloneTexture hack for proper sharing of the same sprite for decals and other purposes.
- better precaching of skyboxes.
- added a light preprocessing pass to the renderer so that a non-persistent buffer can be used with minimal mapping/unmapping. This only gets used if necessary because it adds some overhead to the renderer.
- reactivate alpha testing per fixed function pipeline
- use the 'modern' way to define clip planes (GL_CLIP_DISTANCE). This is far more portable than the old glClipPlane method and a lot more robust than checking this in the fragment shader.
After thinking about it for a day or so I believe it's the best option to remove all compatibility code because it's a major obstacle for a transition to a core profile.