) The older one didn’t. Alleg does all the T&L calculations itself, in its own libraries. And the engine is written with that in mind, making it all but impossible to bypass that code and replace it with DX calls. Alleg has its own “Matrix” class, and that’s passed around in the code to store a transformation. On top of that, the MDL files like to store custom transformations (or something like that), making it even harder to figure out when you can actually make the calls.For lighting, watch the rocks sometime as they rotate. Observe how the lighting is not updated as it turns. Alleg calculates it once, and then loads that every time. Probably for the best; realtime software lighting is more than a poor CPU can take. The ships are like this too, but it’s harder to tell with them.
In conclusion, the software T&L is handled by Alleg, not DX, and the code itself is fighting against any improvements to it. Hence the whole “really big code change” aspect of it.
Keep all the polys triangular. It’s faster. And I don’t think Alleg can even handle non-triangular polys.
