The OffscreenEffect should set up the off screen draw buffer so that it
has the same projection and modelview as if it where on screen; we
achieve that by setting up the viewport to be the same size of the stage
but with an initial offset given by the left-most vertex of the actor.
When we paint the texture attached to the FBO we then set up the
modelview matrix of the on screen draw buffer so that it's the same as
the stage one: this way, the texture will be painted in screen
coordinates and it will occupy the same area as the actor would have
had.
The OffscreenEffect class is meant to be used to implement Effect
sub-classes that create an offscreen framebuffer and redirect the
actor's paint sequence there. The OffscreenEffect is useful for
effects using fragment shaders.
Any shader-based effect being applied to an actor through an offscreen
buffer should be used before painting the resulting target material and
not for every actor. This means that doing:
pre_paint: cogl_program_use(program)
set up offscreen buffer
paint: [ actors ] → offscreen buffer → target material
post_paint: paint target material
cogl_program_use(null)
Is not correct. Unfortunately, we cannot really do:
post_paint: cogl_program_use(program)
paint target material
cogl_program_use(null)
Because the OffscreenEffect::post_paint() implementation also pops the
offscreen buffer and re-instates the previous framebuffer:
post_paint: cogl_program_use(program)
change frame buffer ← ouch!
paint target material
cogl_program_use(null)
One way to fix it is to allow using the shader right before painting
the target material - which means adding a new virtual inside the
OffscreenEffect class vtable in additions to the ones defined by the
parent Effect class.
The newly-added paint_target() virtual allows the correct sequence of
actions by adding an entry point for sub-classes to wrap the "paint
target material" operation with custom code, in order to implement the
case above correctly as:
post_paint: change frame buffer
cogl_program_use(program)
paint target material
cogl_program_use(null)
The added upside is that sub-classes of OffscreenEffect involving
shaders really just need to override the prepare() and paint_target()
virtuals, since the pre_paint() and post_paint() do all that's needed.