Migration for the GLProgramStateCache coming from Cocos 3.17

[kdeckard]

Hello everyone 👋🏻

We are currently in the process of migrating a game from Cocos 3.17 to Axmol v2.

Right now, we are working on porting our custom shaders and shader game code to ESSL v310 and the new Axmol APIs.

While working on it we asked ourselves, if there is a migration or replacement for the old GLProgramStateCache.
We implicitly made quite heavy use of it via cc::GLProgramState::getOrCreateWithGLProgram.

Our question is now, if we still should cache the program states manually or if they are lightweight enough to be created anew every time?

Additionally, we assume that the Node methods virtual void setProgramState(uint32_t programType) and void setProgramStateWithRegistry(uint32_t programType, Texture2D* texture) are intended for builtin shaders only as they internally use the ProgramStateRegistry.

Is that assumption true?

[rh101]

Have you taken a look at ProgramManager? There are several ways you can use it, such as registering shaders to get a 64Bit ID that you can later use to load the cached Program, or simply try to load the shaders, where the ProgramManager will automatically compute the 64Bit ID and load the cached Program if it exists, otherwise it creates a new Program and adds it to the cache.

For example, you could register shaders with ProgramManager::registerCustomProgram(), and store the 64Bit ID that it returns for later use. You pass that ID to ProgramManager::loadProgram(uint64_t progId) to get the cached Program, and then create the ProgramState from it, which you can then set via Node::setProgramState(backend::ProgramState* programState, bool ownPS = false);.

Set ownPS to true if you're passing the ownership of that ProgramState to the node.

Take a look at the NewRendererTests::NewRendererTests() method in RenderTest.cpp of the cpp-tests project for an example.

Additionally, we assume that the Node methods virtual void setProgramState(uint32_t programType) and void setProgramStateWithRegistry(uint32_t programType, Texture2D* texture) are intended for builtin shaders only as they internally use the ProgramStateRegistry.

Yes, those are for internal shaders.

[kdeckard]

Hello 👋🏻

Sorry for coming back to you so late, but we had another topic on our side interrupting our engine migration.

Yes, we had a look at the ProgramManager and it's caching of the Program. Our question was specifically about caching ProgramState instances as this was done in Cocos.

But I infer from your answer that they should be created every time or cached on demand when you need it.

[rh101]

Yes, we had a look at the ProgramManager and it's caching of the Program. Our question was specifically about caching ProgramState instances as this was done in Cocos.

But I infer from your answer that they should be created every time or cached on demand when you need it.

That is correct.

[kdeckard]

Cool. Then thanks for the help 👍🏻