Scrolling Texture Standardization Progress (Patreon)

Well, first of all, the maths I had in mind in the previous post were thought in a hurry and ended up being totally wrong; sorry for that.

The new standard ended up using base36 encoding. The encoding and decoding of base36 values are already implemented, and the renderer was updated accordingly.

Texture naming was also updated for it in the texture compiler. Compiled textures will not have the scrolling nomenclature anymore, because the same external texture should be compatible with both scrolling and non-scrolling variants of the same internal texture. This helps to save storage space.

Due to those changes, the scrolling speed metadata in compiled textures' file headers is deprecated, and the engine will use the scrolling speed set by the internal texture nomenclature instead.

The only remaining change to finish the nomenclature-based part of this standard is to associate scrolling and non-scrolling variants of the same texture to the same data in the RAM, to economize memory. Once this is done, all that will be left to implement is the support in the QBSP compiler (and QuakeSpasm), which Polo said he'll do.

Afterwards, the gamecode support will be implemented. It will not be mandatory, because it won't be needed for textures that scrolls constantly. It will be aimed at features that changes the scrolling speed, direction and position dynamically (e.g. conveyor belts that can be turned on and off, etc).

In other news, I'm recovering from a flu and will have to sue the bank because the bank is refusing to cooperate. I'll talk to my lawyer about it this week.