Animated Furniture (0.7.0 Alpha)

Furniture can now be animated, among a number of other smaller changes.  This release also laid some of the ground-work for sprites (they will use the same animation mechanism).

Here's an animated fireplace (derived from an LPC art asset, license is CC-BY-3.0, by Lanea Zimmerman) that was added to the bootstrap mod as an example:

The source texture for the above:

As you can see, there's four frames for the fire, one for unburned logs and one for used logs.  I have plans for the near future to make this furniture item interactive, allowing the fireplace to start out unburned, then it can be switched on, for the fire animation and finally, if switched off, it will use the burnt logs frame.  For now, it jumps straight to the animated fire when placed.

Additionally, this release should significantly reduce the length of pauses in rendering under Linux when the OpenGL context is invalidated, as textures are now cached in RAM (controlled via the config file) and then transferred to OpenGL, so a context invalidation will no longer result in re-reading all textures from disk.