"Raycast Normals" was introduced in 4.4 dev and defaulted to "false".
The limited testing results at the time suggested that raycasting
generally reduces normal quality compared to native simplifier results,
at the same time increasing vertex memory and import time.
To play it safe, we introduced a setting that defaulted to false, with
the goal of removing it later in 4.4 development cycle if no regressions
are noticed. Since we already had three dev snapshots and no reports,
this change removes the setting and associated code.
"Normal Split Angle" was only used when raycast normals were enabled;
this change removes it from the settings, but keeps it in the script
binding for compatibility.
Existing meshes import exactly the same after this change (unless they
chose to override raycasting which would be surprising).
split_normals helper was only used in this code path and is also removed
for simplicity; it is unlikely that this code will be useful as is, as
it can only regenerate normals without fixing tangents or updating
positions.
Previously, vertex cache optimization was ran for the LOD meshes, but
was never ran for the base mesh or for the shadow meshes, including
shadow LOD chain (shadow LOD chain would sometimes get implicitly
optimized for vertex cache as a byproduct of base LOD optimization, but
not always). This could significantly affect the rendering performance
of geometry heavy scenes, especially for depth or shadow passes where
the fragment load is light.
Normal raycaster makes LOD generation process >2x slower and often
generates normals that look significantly worse compared to what the
simplifier comes up with by default. This was likely different before
last meshoptimizer upgrade, as the attribute metric was not functioning
properly, but now it looks like it's doing more harm than good.
This change makes it disabled by default but keeps an easy option to
re-enable it per mesh using LOD parameters for now until we get more
confidence and can remove the code outright.
Because the long term plan would be to disable this feature entirely,
the scripting API isn't changed, and it's just off-by-default there with
no way to re-enable.
