given that the largest bottle neck in
applications is the bandwidth would it
be possible to introduce a glColor1[…] type
function to specify a luminosity value
for the current vertex rather than calling
glColor3[…]
eg
glColor1b(255);
would be the same as
glColor3b(255,255,255);
and simularly add this functionallity to
glColorPointer etc.
I dunno… wouldn’t make much sense for interleaved vertex formats, because you’d almost certainly waste the “saved” memory as alignment padding, but for disjoint arrays it might work.
On a sort-of-related note, I did wonder semi-seriously whether a glVertex1 might make sense for vertex programs acting as functions of one variable… probably not.