This was due to the internal counter in the object being just 2 bytes,
which was made in order to optimize the Object class size. In practice
however, not counting the vtables, the class has SEVEN pointers and then
a transformation part that's in most cases multiple of 8. Which means
that on 64 bit platforms there was always 5 bytes of padding next to
this 2-byte counter and 1-byte flags, thus no reason to have it 2-byte
anyway.
On 32-bit platforms this *might* cause the Object to get bigger, yes,
but as it's heap-allocated it's more likely that it's put on a
16-byte-aligned address and thus occupying a multiple of 16 bytes
anyway. In any case, this won't really hurt, because the SceneGraph
situation is bad enough already due to all the pointer chasings and
overhead from loose allocations.
Vladimír Vondruš