This was many changes that were largely fundamentally related. They included:
- More const modifiers to enforce read only node graphs
- Support for fragment and vertex shaders from the nodes
- Support for node code loaded externally (embedded into the binary)
- Fixed issue preventing two textures from being used in a shader
- Removed several unused functions and cleaned up code
- Fixed video media node misreading its matrix input
Workers run in different threads and the backends can poll whether the worker
is currently busy or not. However the previous iteration has the worker (and an
atomic int) provide the busy state which could easily desync with the main
thread (since all workers run in different threads). By holding the busy states
in the main thread, the main thread will always be able to poll the busy state
accurately.
If the nodes are now stateless, there's nothing stopping the renderer from
rendering multiple frames at once. Earlier since the nodes held some of their
input/output data (and that data could change per frame), it was not possible
to render multiple frames at once without conflicts. Now that the node state is
held in render threads, they can do whatever they want at any time.
I was under the impression Q_DISABLE_COPY_MOVE was a much older function than
it is. Since we historically target 5.6 and these functions are small
convenience functions, I just implemented them in the actual codebase.
Since we're now working with a separate proxy copy of the original node graph,
if the user changes a parameter in one of those nodes (triggering an
InvalidateCache signal), the values in our copied graph need to be updated
with these new values too.
Previous iterations would use mutexes to prevent changing of the graph
mid-render, however several user actions would need to capture these mutexes
causing the main thread to hang until the current render job (frame/range of
samples) was complete. We now copy the nodes necessary as part of the "compile"
process so that the main thread shouldn't need nearly as much blocking while
caching occurs.
Both audio and video renderers were working off the same invalidation signal
(i.e. changing audio would also trigger a re-render of the video). This is
obviously suboptimal and now they are separate.
Major refactoring work to try sharing as much code as possible between the
video renderers and audio renderers, as well as make them as
platform-independent as possible.
The previous iteration was fairly OpenGL-heavy. It's now been separated into
a base class that is OpenGL independent and a derived class that is
OpenGL-based. Over time this should allow for portability away from OpenGL
if necessary.
itsmattkc