3D rendering strategy

[bvssvni]

Piston does not have advanced 3D rendering libraries yet. There are 2 major features I would like to have:

Managing 3D assets with contiguous arrays: #587

This will make it easier to manage the geometry for a whole scene and the structure could in theory be understood by GPU shaders.

Update content in real time with Verse protocol: #553

In addition, there are many different rendering techniques which might require bottom-up design. Are there any ideas how this can be split up into modular pieces?

[bvssvni]

With contiguous arrays you can append geometry at the end of the buffer and move the index ranges to point to the position. This makes the old geometry garbage in the buffer, but this can be clean up incrementally. Unused memory can be inferred from the whole structure using set algorithms.

[bvssvni]

If we support metadata layers in the range hierarchy, then we can build a library for ordering drawcalls that uses grouping per material etc. http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=86