This applies an API naming change that's been deliberated over for a
while now which is to rename CoglMaterial to CoglPipeline.
For now the new pipeline API is marked as experimental and public
headers continue to talk about materials not pipelines. The CoglMaterial
API is now maintained in terms of the cogl_pipeline API internally.
Currently this API is targeting Cogl 2.0 so we will have time to
integrate it properly with other upcoming Cogl 2.0 work.
The basic reasons for the rename are:
- That the term "material" implies to many people that they are
constrained to fragment processing; perhaps as some kind of high-level
texture abstraction.
- In Clutter they get exposed by ClutterTexture actors which may be
re-inforcing this misconception.
- When comparing how other frameworks use the term material, a material
sometimes describes a multi-pass fragment processing technique which
isn't the case in Cogl.
- In code, "CoglPipeline" will hopefully be a much more self documenting
summary of what these objects represent; a full GPU pipeline
configuration including, for example, vertex processing, fragment
processing and blending.
- When considering the API documentation story, at some point we need a
document introducing developers to how the "GPU pipeline" works so it
should become intuitive that CoglPipeline maps back to that
description of the GPU pipeline.
- This is consistent in terminology and concept to OpenGL 4's new
pipeline object which is a container for program objects.
Note: The cogl-material.[ch] files have been renamed to
cogl-material-compat.[ch] because otherwise git doesn't seem to treat
the change as a moving the old cogl-material.c->cogl-pipeline.c and so
we loose all our git-blame history.
A CoglVertexAttribute defines a single attribute contained in a
CoglVertexArray. I.e. a CoglVertexArray is simply a buffer of N bytes
intended for containing a collection of attributes (position, color,
normals etc) and a CoglVertexAttribute defines one such attribute by
specifying its start offset in the array, its type, the number of
components and the stride etc.