Coronas, ground curvature, glowing materials

[rherriman]

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[rherriman]

I should either fix this line to just use the raw vertexGlow (and remove maxGlow from the shader entirely), or go ahead and replace the single 32-bit float in the vertex array with four uint8_t's similar to how specular/shininess are stored and follow that pattern. That would mean 3 uint8_t's would be "reserved" for additional material properties in the future.

I don't love that plan, but ultimately, it's occupying exactly the same amount of space as it is currently.

[rherriman]

...it also occurs to me that maybe simply reordering the layout of the struct would rectify the issue I was seeing. If I put all the floats at the beginning and the uint8_t's at the end, I don't believe I'll have the same padding issues.

[rherriman]

Actually what am I saying, it's an array of these vertices, there will still be padding issues unless I reserve the padding explicitly.

[rherriman]

I decided to go ahead and make glow a uint8_t in the vertex array after all, and reserving three additional spots for material parameters.

Normally I would be against wasting space like this, but I justified it thusly:

• Before this commit, glow was already being represented by 32-bits,
• The reserved slots would be a good place to fit in some of bobski's ideas in Implement non-textural graphic eye-candy #173,
• Avara is a strange beast compared to other 3D games--even storing these properties redundantly per vertex is actually cheaper than how similar features are implemented in other games with textures, where each pixel per albedo, normal map, etc. texture is 32-bits!