Primitive draw functions optimization (?)

[MrGallo]

Are there any plans (or impediments) to handle primitive draw functions (e.g., arcade.draw_circle) the way arcade.draw_text is handled? Create a cache and a shape sprite and use those to draw, rather than reconstructing the shape each on_draw iteration?

[pvcraven]

No plans. Seems like it would be possible though.

[MrGallo]

I'm having difficulty understanding https://github.com/pvcraven/arcade/blob/90630926eb3f181c511143a105217962370e61bb/arcade/draw_commands.py#L395
It takes the shape as points, and then evaporates into the air. How would one take the generated shape and stick it into a texture (to be able to cache and put in a shape_sprite)?

The draw_text function uses PIL.
https://github.com/pvcraven/arcade/blob/90630926eb3f181c511143a105217962370e61bb/arcade/text.py#L215-L228

Would that mean we would now have to draw shapes using PIL, or can we derive a PIL.Image from the _generic_draw_line_strip function?

[pvcraven]

Textures and PIL have nothing to do with the primitive shape drawing.

Drawing involves creating a bunch of points and drawing triangles between them. In the case of sprites/text we pop an image on the triangle. In the case of drawing primitives, we just set colors.

You can take a look at the ShapeElementList to get an idea how it is done. If fact, you might be able to use that code.

[pvcraven]

Putting this on the enhancement list, and closing.

[einarf]

@MrGallo Just to keep you updated. I think this issue is already solved.

The draw functions have been heavily optimized since this issue was created. Most of them are fast enough to not need any caching now. We generate the gemoetry on the fly with a geometry shader.

Text is also no longer cached since we switched to pyglet text. This caching caused so many issues I don't really know where to start. A slightly faster alternative to draw_text is the Text object, but this is not needed in most cases.

Buffered shapes still need a lot of work though, but they are more than ok for static things.