Announcing new OpenGL renderer

[James W. <ja...@fr...>]

I've committed the code for my new renderer.  I updated the projects for 
  CodeWarrior and Xcode/Carbon, leaving Xcode/Cocoa, Visual Studio, and 
the Unix makefile for others to handle.


Question: Should the triangle-strip computing function be exposed as a 
public API, and if so, which header should it go in?


Visible Differences from Interactive Renderer

* There is no distinction between the "both" and "flip" backfacing
   styles.  Both cases use normal OpenGL two-sided lighting.

* Geometries of dimension less than 2 (Point, Line, PolyLine,
   Ellipse, NURBCurve) are unaffected by the direction of the light.

* Textures of pixel type kQ3PixelTypeARGB16 are treated differently.
   With the default linear texture filtering, you will see a smooth
   transition from transparent to opaque.


Performance Notes

* In order for a TriMesh to be on the "fast path" for the OpenGL
   renderer,

   * it must be a retained object
   * it must have vertex normals
   * it must not have color or texture with transparency
   * it must not have per-face colors (unless per-vertex colors are also
     present)
   * it must not have per-face textures

* Per-face normals on TriMeshes are ignored.

* You will get better performance with a few large TriMeshes than
   with many small ones.  The "MultiBox" test in the Geom Test sample
   is a particularly bad case, having 4000 TriMeshes with 2 triangles
   each.

* A fast-path TriMesh with more than 500 faces will be cached as a
   vertex buffer object when the hardware supports it, and otherwise
   as a display list.

* When a fast-path TriMesh has more than 500 faces, we compute a
   triangle strip for it and cache the strip in an object property.

* This renderer gives much more of a performance boost when the video
   card has actual VRAM rather than shared system memory.
-- 
   James W. Walker, Innoventive Software LLC
   <http://www.frameforge3d.com/>