[Soc-2012-dev] Viewport FX - Weekly Report 10-11

[Jason Wilkins]

Week 10

(This is last weeks report.  I started to draft it but somehow ended
up not sending it)

Spent a large part of the week experimenting with different approaches
to unifying the immediate mode and VBO paths for drawing meshes.  I
got into a "Turing Tar Pit" when I decided it would be really cool to
unify all of the different drawing modes into a single path.  Decided
it was probably too late in the summer to go down that road and
shelved that line of work until later this year.  I decided to go with
a less ambitious rewrite.

Week 11

Besides some simple work wrapping up OpenGL lighting state functions,
I have been putting into place the ability to override OpenGL state at
various named points.  The idea is very simple but powerful, put a
gpuDoodleBegin/gpuDoodleEnd pair around each "doodle", (which is just
a set of drawing commands that outputs some recognizable part of the
image), and these functions have the option of modifying the graphics
state.  For my limited purposes this summer I really just want to be
able to redirect drawing to different frame buffers.  But in the
future it could be expanded into a general framework for changing
various aspects of OpenGL's state.  That word "aspect" is important
because this is similar to adding an aspect-oriented programming model
to OpenGL.

In fact it just occurred to me that people might prefer the word
"aspect" to "doodle" which was just a cute word I was using until I
came up with something better  :-)