RE: [Plib-devel] Work outstanding.

[Vallevand, M. K <Mar...@UN...>]

The change to use short indices is ready.  I hadn't considered some
of these other improvements.  Doing this correctly requires some
thought.  My first thought is templates.  But, the P in PLIB is
*portable*, not *painful*.

Anyway, the short indices change to ssgVtxArray and ssgIndexArray
is ready, but I can't get cvs/ssh to commit the changes.
*sigh*
Welcome to *my* small corner of hell.

Regards.
Mark K Vallevand   ma...@rs...
Never try and teach a pig to sing: it's a waste of time, and it annoys
the pig.

> 
>   * The new ssgVtxArray class could be made more efficient 
> (especially for GeForce
>     cards) if we added the option to pass Normal arrays as 
> 'short' or 'byte' and
>     Colour arrays as 'byte'.  At present, we have both of 
> those as 'float' - so
>     to send a vertex to T&L hardware like GeForce or Radion 
> is taking ~48 bytes.
>     If we could cut the precision, we'd only send ~27 bytes.  
> Since data transfer
>     to the card is very often the limiting factor with 
> hardware T&L, we could perhaps
>     double performance on those cards without harming non-T&L 
> cards.  The loss in
>     precision doesn't matter because normals are pretty much 
> only used for lighting -
>     which in the end produces an 8 bit result - and colours 
> are hardly every more
>     than 8 bits - even with 32 bits per pixel frame buffer depth.
> 
>     (Notice that for *environment mapping* you may need more 
> precise normals).
> 
> 
> Well, welcome to my hell!
> 
> -- 
> Steve Baker