[racket] Crowdsourcing Pict3D's design

On 03/19/2015 02:09 PM, Raoul Duke wrote:
>> Currently, the vertex data for frozen shapes is transferred every frame. The
>> 3D engine is saturating your AGP bus.
>
> the year 2003 called and wants its technology back. :-)

The year 1861 sent you a telegraph: they want their insult back. :p

Anyway... there are things missing from Pict3D not because they're 
difficult, but because I haven't decided on a design. This one's a prime 
example. The 3D engine already uses vertex buffer objects (i.e. current 
tech) to stream vertex data. It would be easy to give each frozen Pict3D 
its own, and send to and evict from the GPU based on some caching 
policy. But I haven't researched good policies yet.

Texture and normal maps are another prime example. From a UI 
perspective, texture coordinates have got to be the worst way to 
associate sub-geometry details with a shape. I don't know what Pict3D 
will have instead. I'm half-inclined to make a mini-DSL that compiles to 
vertex and fragment shaders and let you figure it out. :D

Neil ⊥