Added occlusion culling capability in the BGE.
More info: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.49/Game_Engine#BGE_Scenegraph_improvement
MSVC, scons, cmake, Makefile updated.
Other minor performance improvements:
- The rasterizer was computing the openGL model matrix of the objects too many times
- DBVT view frustrum culling was not properly culling behind the near plane:
Large objects behind the camera were sent to the GPU
- Remove all references to mesh split/join feature as it is not yet functional
This commit contains a number of performance improvements for the
BGE in the Scenegraph (parent relation between objects in the
scene) and view frustrum culling.
The scenegraph improvement consists in avoiding position update
if the object has not moved since last update and the removal
of redundant updates and synchronization with the physics engine.
The view frustrum culling improvement consists in using the DBVT
broadphase facility of Bullet to build a tree of graphical objects
in the scene. The elements of the tree are Aabb boxes (Aligned
Axis Bounding Boxes) enclosing the objects. This provides good
precision in closed and opened scenes. This new culling system
is enabled by default but just in case, it can be disabled with
a button in the World settings. There is no do_version in this
commit but it will be added before the 2.49 release. For now you
must manually enable the DBVT culling option in World settings
when you open an old file.
The above improvements speed up scenegraph and culling up to 5x.
However, this performance improvement is only visible when
you have hundreds or thousands of objects.
The main interest of the DBVT tree is to allow easy occlusion
culling and automatic LOD system. This will be the object of further
improvements.
