Using openMemory() instead of openData() allows the implementation to
assume the data will stay in scope for as long as needed, which can
prevent unnecessary copies in some plugin implementations.
It warranted a new flag, DataFlag::ExternallyOwned, to describe this
kind of memory. I couldn't reuse Owned as that's used for allocations
owned by the instance, which is too little for certain future use cases.
For example returning *Data instances referencing an Owned memory would
mean the user has to assume the memory is gone when the importer
instance is gone, and that's generally not true for memory passed to
openMemory().
Originally I thought I would do this later, but then realized the
existing plugin implementations would need to get all updated again to
be aware of the new flag, with some being forgotten, and it's just
easier to do the whole thing in a single step.
This allows to better describe memory ownership and transfer it instead
of forcing the plugins to allocate their own local copy if the import
happens in-place on the imported data. Right now that's mainly for the
openFile() use case, which implicitly allocated an Array with file
contents only to pass it to openData() which then made a copy because it
could not make any assumption about data scope.
In other words, certain plugins (TgaImporter, KtxImporter, DdsImporter,
CgltfImporter and possibly others) will now have their peak memory usage
*halved*.
There will be Flag::FlipY for images at some point, enabled by default
for compatibility with existing GL code, and so it makes sense to start
discouraging setFlags() as early as possible to avoid people resetting
the default by accident.
Also update the imageconverter, sceneconverter and shaderconverter utils
to use these instead of setFlags().
Makes more sense as the function isn't expected to fail (and thus any
kind of lazy population is not possible as it would be too late for
error checks anyway).
*Not* updating interface strings even though this is an ABI break
because we're doing that right after the skin import interface bump.
The plugin interface version got bumped to avoid ABI issues when loading
plugins that weren't updated for the change, but apart from that this
shouldn't be a breaking change, as the API returns a type that can be
both an Optional and a Pointer.
Until now, except for an attribute-less index-less mesh, the vertex
count was only implicitly taken from passed attributes, but it was
severely limiting:
- There was no way to set vertex count for an attribute-less
indexed mesh, which didn't make sense
- All code that made non-owning MeshData instances referencing another
MeshData had to explicitly handle the attribute-less corner case to
avoid vertex count getting lost
- Offset-only attributes couldn't be used to specify static layout of
meshes with dynamic vertex count, causing unnecessary extra
allocations especially in the Primitives library.
Similar to image mip level import, but this is largely left to be
importer-specific. For example PLY defines per-face data and sometimes
one might want to import them as-is, without them being turned into a
per-vertex property.
For backwards compatibility these will delegate to the new MeshData
interfaces for 3D (and nothing for 2D, because so far there were no 2D
scene importers).
It'll get used outside of the root namespace and since the callbacks tend
to be quite complex, it would be silly to require users to implement one
callback for Trade, one for Text and one for Audio, for example.
Vladimír Vondruš