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Alpha blending + sorting was revised, to fix bugs and get it
to work more predictable.
* A new per texture face "Sort" setting defines if the face
is alpha sorted or not, instead of abusing the "ZTransp"
setting as it did before.
* Existing files are converted to hopefully match the old
behavior as much as possible with a version patch.
* On new meshes the Sort flag is disabled by the default, to
avoid unexpected and hard to find slowdowns.
* Alpha sorting for faces was incredibly slow. Sorting faces
in a mesh with 600 faces lowered the framerate from 200 to
70 fps in my test.. the sorting there case goes about 15x
faster now, but it is still advised to use Clip Alpha if
possible instead of regular Alpha.
* There still various limitations in the alpha sorting code,
I've added some comments to the code about this.
Some docs at the bottom of the page:
http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-246/realtime-glsl-materials/
Merged some fixes from the apricot branch, most important
change is that tangents are now exactly the same as the rest
of Blender, instead of being computed in the game engine with a
different algorithm.
Also, the subversion was bumped to 1.
All data layers, including MVert/MEdge/MFace, are now managed as custom
data layers. The pointers like Mesh.mvert, Mesh.dvert or Mesh.mcol are
still used of course, but allocating, copying or freeing these arrays
should be done through the CustomData API.
Work in progress documentation on this is here:
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/BlenderArchitecture/CustomData
Replaced TFace by MTFace:
This is the same struct, except that it does not contain color, that now
always stays separated in MCol. This was not a good design decision to
begin with, and it is needed for adding multiple color layers later. Note
that this does mean older Blender versions will not be able to read UV
coordinates from the next release, due to an SDNA limitation.
Removed DispListMesh:
This now fully replaced by DerivedMesh. To provide access to arrays of
vertices, edges and faces, like DispListMesh does. The semantics of the
DerivedMesh.getVertArray() and similar functions were changed to return
a pointer to an array if one exists, or otherwise allocate a temporary
one. On releasing the DerivedMesh, this temporary array will be removed
automatically.
Removed ssDM and meshDM DerivedMesh backends:
The ssDM backend was for DispListMesh, so that became obsolete automatically.
The meshDM backend was replaced by the custom data backend, that now figures
out which layers need to be modified, and only duplicates those.
This changes code in many places, and overall removes 2514 lines of code.
So, there's a good chance this might break some stuff, although I've been
testing it for a few days now. The good news is, adding multiple color and
uv layers should now become easy.
Armatures are back
Split screen
Double sided lightning
Ambient lighting
Alpha test
Material IPO support (one per object atm)
Blender materials
GLSL shaders - Python access
Up to three texture samplers from the material panel ( 2D & Cube map )
Python access to a second set of uv coordinates
See http://www.elysiun.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=58057
