Ok, what’s so special about the following picture:
Well, nothing, except that the scene was rendered with OpenGL shaders instead of the old fixed function pipeline. Which in this case (2d graphics) was not the biggest change, essentially only the 2d projection matrix has to be setup for the shader. 3d graphics will require more work, though. Also some refactoring will be necessary, some of which has already happened. For example, there is a 3d renderer interface class now with two implementations, which can be selected from the ResidualVM menu (a third one, based on TinyGL, is supposed to follow at some point in the future).
For some reason, when walking into the house and also when leaving it, during the animation the cursor becomes completely black, but only with the shader renderer. Now I am not too unhappy about this, at least it shows that the two renderers indeed operate differently.
Speaking of different behavior, the shader renderer might also be helpful when going back to lighting, since currently, the fixed function renderer does not give the same results as the original Wintermute Engine. If the shader renderer can reproduce WME lighting, than something would be wrong with the fixed function settings. If, on the other hand, shader and fixed function renderer produce the same results, something will be wrong with the rest of the code, possible normal vectors. If all three implementations are different, than it’s kitchen sink, though.