I've just moved sky across to the new "no texturechains, no glpoly_t" renderer. Sky is a little more complex than regular brush surfs as it needs to be drawn before the entire world and everything in it, so I've needed to do something disgusting to get it working OK. I'll probably be fine-tuning this as time goes on and at least looking to integrate it into the same setup as brush surfs (although it will still need to be drawn first). The intention is to meet somewhere in the middle; the current setup is rather volatile at the moment and liable to change from time to time.
Part of the grief here is instanced brush models: ammo boxes/etc. It's easy to see why ID got rid of them in subsequent engines; integrating them into the main render is just a whole barrel of hassle. Things are more difficult once you realise that you need to support sky and water surfs on them (which I do). The solution I currently have is workable for sure, but has room for improvement in code cleanliness and maintainability (wait till we get on to alpha-test surfs in mods and it will need rewriting; I prefer to at least get it so that I can have less to do then).
Of course one solution is to just do it the way GLQuake does and be damned. I don't really see that as being anyway optimal though; there are a lot of things badly wrong with the way GLQuake does things and that's the reason why Quake performs badly in certain setups.
I think I'm going to get a new laptop soon. I haven't really treated myself to a nice Christmas present yet, and the old HP dv1000 I do most of my DirectQ work on is showing it's age badly (it's gonna be 4 shortly). I still intend using it as a secondary test platform just to ensure that frame rates are maintained well enough on older machines, but compile times are starting to irritate (especially now that I'm changing headers around so much). It'll make a nice web browsing machine, and be handy to bring around when I'm travelling as I won't need to care so much if it gets bashed about a little.
1 comments:
Ha, I just treated myself to a new desktop, and as geeky as it is, it felt great pressing the power button for the first time, and I couldn't be happier. I hear ya - you deserve a treat, so do it!
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