[Soc-2014-dev] Weekly Report #7 Viewport FX III

[Jason Wilkins]

I set a few modest goals last week and I was a little disappointed that
that is about all I was able to do.  Then I realized I lost a couple of
days due to having to go home early one day (a pipe burst) and of course,
the July 4th holiday.

This week:

* Extension Shims - This is just a way of reducing the amount of
conditional compilation and branches that can happen due to the different
possible OpenGL APIs that may be available.

* State Policy - Reducing the number of OpenGL API calls by choosing a
"policy" for each state that results in the fewest calls.  For example I
eliminated a few dozen calls to glBlendFunc by just assuming that the state
is GL_ALPHA/GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA.

At this point I regretted that I ignored the Game Engine last year because
I'm not completely sure that all my state policies can hold across all of
Blender, BlenderPlayer, and the embedded Game Engine without more testing.

Next Week:

One reason I was conservative about goals last week was that I wanted to
think about my next move, since it wasn't completely clear to be at the
time, but I think I figured it out.

There is a module called "gpu_immediate" that is meant as a replacement for
immediate mode.  Not a great name since it is more like a vertex buffer
builder and is capable of saving vertex buffers for reuse.  My goal for
this week is to get that module into a reviewable state.

There is some overlap between it and gpu_buffers and some of the cases
where Blender uses vertex arrays instead of immediate mode that should be
combined to remove the redundancy.  Also I've been meaning to use vertex
array objects for over a year now and I want to get to that.
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