Also not something the classic GPU vertex pipeline can handle, but
useful for other scenarios. Subsequently a support for array indices
will be added, allowing to directly represent for example OBJ files,
where each attribute has its own index buffer.
This is not something the classic GPU vertex pipeline can handle
(except maybe Vulkan, which can handle zero strides for instanced
attributes?), but useful for other scenarios. This means existing code
needs to be aware of and handle the new corner case.
This took me quite a while to realize -- not always it's desirable to
have the original layout unconditionally preserved, especially if for
example filtering a MeshData to just a subset of attributes.
Looking at the snippets, these seem to have been written back when there
was no builtin shaders yet, it seems, not to mention
MeshTools::compile(), Trade::MeshData or any of the other high-level
APIs. Rather overwhelming to just throw huge code snippets at the user,
explaining a workflow with a custom-made mesh that's going to be drawn
with a custom-made shader, which is like level 999 of using the GL
library.
It was rather discouraging to start "Basic usage" with a boring-ass long
snippet. On the other hand showing just compile() first would lead
people to think it's all some opaque magic, so trying to balance that a
bit.
Also why the hell was the compile() snippet showing the horrendous GL
way of specifying attribute formats? This is not great either but at
least not redundant.
Those have 3 pointers at least, my limit for passing by value is trivial
copyability and two pointers. I hope that reflects the actual HW at
least vaguely, heh.
Long ago, during one of the few initial MeshData iterations. there was
no VertexFormat, but rather Trade::MeshAttributeType. I managed to get
rid of it mostly, except this place.
The array size is always last, defaulting to 0. This makes it consistent
with the offset-only constructor and removes two unnecessary overloads.
It's a breaking change, but I don't think array attributes have many
users yet -- and better to do this now than later. In any case, sorry
about breaking your code.
While 27f6cc309d made it easier to create
references to attribute-less meshes by avoiding a branch on
attributeCount() (and then using a constructor with explicit vertex
count), code still had to branch on isIndexed() because indices() could
be called only on indexed meshes. This change allows code like
Trade::MeshData reference{data.primitive(),
{}, data.indexData(), Trade::MeshIndexData{data.indices()},
{}, data.vertexData(), Trade::meshAttributeDataNonOwningArray(data.attributeData()),
data.vertexCount()};
which works correctly for all cases and doesn't introduce extra branches
and code paths that would need to be tested. While definitely better, I
might still give up at some point and introduce some
Trade::MeshData::nonOwningImmutableReference() helper for this.
Put the pointer that differs in size on 32 and 64bit platforms last so
we have at least the prefix always stable. This also makes it possible
to extend the class to store 8/16 bytes of arbitrary data in there
(bounds etc.). Not doing that yet, just preparing for possible
extension.
Originally wanted to offload this to someone else, but then realized I
need those for generic vertex attribute definitions, which I need for
instancing, which I need now. So here it is, at the bottom of the
dependency chain.
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.