The nodes now have more control over how their accelerated shaders/sample
functions are run, as well as how items are popped off the value tables.
This allows for various optimizations that we didn't have access to before.
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
Since all Nodes have an output that provides all output values now, we now
never need to add an output from a Node derivative. These changes remove the
last of them and disable the ability to add more outputs from a derivative.
If Nodes only have the one output, we don't need to do so much differentiation
between them. Previous iteration used outputs as like a distinct function
within a Node (e.g. length output would return one result, buffer output would
produce a different result - each run different code to produce their results).
Now in this iteration, it's more accurate to say a Node is just one function
(which seems more appropriate for a node system anyway).
Since the nodes won't be holding any rendering data themselves in this system,
we may as well enforce some level of non-write access by setting all the
functions to const. They were already const-friendly, they just weren't
labelled as such.
The new rendering pipeline strives to simplify the nodes themselves as much
as possible and move much of the logic to an external rendering engine. This
change removes all of the responsibilities that no longer belong to the
nodes themselves and will soon be folded into the renderer.
Nodes were previously written to be "strongly typed" in that a parameter's
"type" enforced whether it could be connected to another. All code related
to that has now been removed since not only is it hard to maintain and
likely unnecessary, it's possible the nodes will work differently later on
anyway.
itsmattkc