Supply normals for edge hits #7039
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Goober5000
approved these changes
Sep 16, 2025
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Now, you may be asking, "how can an edge have a sensible normal".
In FSO, we have a lot of places that expect to get a valid normal for every collision. So what to do in the case of an edge hit? In most cases, especially for VFX, it's enough to get a normal that's sufficiently close and contiguous compared to surrounding normals. As such, returning the normal of any of the faces that an edge belongs to is likely going to be a sufficient approximation.
There's a few places that still calculate manual normals in case of an edge hit with a different strategy, but as these don't rely on the value returned by the collision code, we can ignore them here.
This fixes several particle related bugs where a proper normal was expected, and restores normal-alignment functionality for beams that was removed in #7038