Drawing and clipping to paths is generally quite expensive because the
geometry has to be tessellated into triangles in a single VBO which
breaks up the journal batching. If we can detect when the path
contains just a single rectangle then we can instead divert to calling
cogl_rectangle which will take advantage of the journal, or by pushing
a rectangle clip which usually ends up just using the scissor.
This patch adds a boolean to each path to mark when it is a
rectangle. It gets cleared whenever a node is added or gets set to
TRUE whenever cogl2_path_rectangle is called. This doesn't try to
catch cases where a rectangle is composed by cogl_path_line_to and
cogl_path_move_to commands.
This is part of a broader cleanup of some of the experimental Cogl API.
One of the reasons for this particular rename is to reduce the verbosity
of using the API. Another reason is that CoglVertexArray is going to be
renamed CoglAttributeBuffer and we want to help emphasize the
relationship between CoglAttributes and CoglAttributeBuffers.
Previously when stroking a path it was flushing a pipeline and then
directly calling glDrawArrays to draw the line strip from the path
nodes array. This patch changes it to build a CoglVertexArray and a
series of attributes to paint with instead. The vertex array and
attributes are attached to the CoglPath so it can be reused later. The
old vertex array for filling has been renamed to fill_vbo.
When COGL_ENABLE_EXPERIMENTAL_2_0_API is defined cogl.h will now include
cogl2-path.h which changes cogl_path_new() so it can directly return a
CoglPath pointer; it no longer exposes a prototype for
cogl_{get,set}_path and all the remaining cogl_path_ functions now take
an explicit path as their first argument.
The idea is that we want to encourage developers to retain path objects
for as long as possible so they can take advantage of us uploading the
path geometry to the GPU. Currently although it is possible to start a
new path and query the current path, it is not convenient.
The other thing is that we want to get Cogl to the point where nothing
depends on a global, current context variable. This will allow us to one
day define a sensible threading model if/when that is ever desired.
This adds two new API calls- cogl_path_set_fill_rule and
cogl_path_get_fill_rule. This allows modifying the fill rule of the
current path. In addition to the previous default fill rule of
'even-odd' it now supports the 'non-zero' rule. The fill rule is a
property of the path (not the Cogl context) so creating a new path or
preserving a path with cogl_path_get_handle affects the fill rule.
Instead of drawing paths using the stencil buffer trick, it now
tesselates the path into triangles using the GLU tesselator and
renders them directly. A vbo is created with one vertex for each node
on the path. The tesselator is used to generate a series of indices
into the vbo as triangles. The tesselator's output of strips and fans
is converted into GL_TRIANGLES so that it can be rendered with a
single draw call (but the vertices are still shared via the
indices). The vbo is stored with the path so that if the application
uses retained paths then Cogl won't have to tessellate again.
The vertices also have texture coordinates associated with them so
that it can replicate the old behaviour of drawing a material with a
texture by fitting the texture to the bounding box of the path and
then clipping it. However if the texture contains waste or is sliced
then the vertex buffer code will refuse to draw it. In this case it
will revert back to drawing the path into the stencil buffer and then
drawing the material as a clipped quad.
The VBO is used even when setting up the stencil buffer for clipping
to a path because the tessellated geometry may cover less area.
The old scanline rasterizer has been removed because the tesselator
should work equally well on drivers with no stencil buffer.
_cogl_path_get_bounds is no longer static and is exported in
cogl-path-private.h so that it can be used in the clip stack code. The
old version of the function returned x/y and width/height. However
this was mostly used to call cogl_rectangle which takes x1/y1
x2/y2. The function has been changed to just directly return the
second form because it is more useful. Anywhere that was previously
using the function now just directly looks at path->path_nodes_min and
path->path_nodes_max instead.
This replaces the use of CoglHandle with strongly type CoglPath *
pointers instead. The only function not converted for now is
cogl_is_path which will be done in a later commit.
Previously a path copy was implemented such that only the array of
path nodes was shared with the source and the rest of the data is
copied. This was so that the copy could avoid a deep copy if the
source path is appended to because the copy keeps track of its own
length. This optimisation is probably not worthwhile because it makes
the copies less cheap. Instead the CoglPath struct now just contains a
single pointer to a new CoglPathData struct which is separately
ref-counted. When the path is modified it will be copied if the ref
count on the data is not 1.
This adds three new API calls:
CoglHandle cogl_path_get()
void cogl_path_set(CoglHandle path)
CoglHandle cogl_path_copy(CoglHandle path)
All of the fields relating to the path have been moved from the Cogl
context to a new CoglPath handle type. The cogl context now just
contains a CoglPath handle. All of the existing path commands
manipulate the data in the current path handle. cogl_path_new now just
creates a new path handle and unrefs the old one.
The path handle can be stored for later with cogl_path_get. The path
can then be copied with cogl_path_copy. Internally it implements
copy-on-write semantics with an extra optimisation that it will only
copy the data if the new path is modified, but not if the original
path is modified. It can do this because the only way to modify a path
is by appending to it so the copied path is able to store its own path
length and only render the nodes up to that length. For this to work
the copied path also needs to keep its own copies of the path extents
because the parent path may change these by adding nodes.
The clip stack now uses the cogl_path_copy mechanism to store paths in
the stack instead of directly copying the data. This should save some
memory and processing time.
