This code was apparently done before the batch casters were a thing. Now
it's no reason to do the same in two places, additionally in the future
the castInto() could get SIMD-optimized and this can benefit from that.
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.
It now supports both color+texture (instead of just one or the other)
which made it much simpler to use (and implement as well), also can
reference normal maps and specify texture coordinate transformation now.
The old APIs are depecated, but no tests or other code is updated yet in
order to ensure everything continues to work as before.
Except MeshVisualizer and VertexColor, which don't have any texturing,
so there it's not needed. In most cases the tests are reusing existing
ground truth files and only modifying transformations / flipping images.
Interestingly enough, on Phong it was named textureCoords while on the
C++ side it was asking for textureCoordinates, and I don't remember this
being an issue *ever*, on any driver.
As usual, the old APIs are still present, but marked as deprecated.
Existing code is not updated yet to ensure I didn't break anything with
this.
This way it's much more intuitive and makes the code shorter and nicer
in many cases. Shaders are now also able to hide irrelevant
draw/dispatch APIs to avoid accidents.
Now possible in all cases, except for grid, where the combination count
is too large to be practical, even more so with the introduction of
tangents in the future.
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.
The combineIndexArrays() and combineIndexedArrays() API is replaced with
a more generic combineIndexedAttributes(), and thanks to that we also
don't need STL-based duplicate() and removeDuplicates().