Re: [AD] blending regression

[Pavel Sountsov <slabode@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Elias Pschernig wrote:

> We should still try to hide that from the user I think. Use an
> ALLEGRO_COLOR throughout user visible structs, then convert before
> passing to DX - it just will make things less confusing. And it should
> make no difference performance wise - instead of having the user do the
> (seemingly pointless) conversion before passing colors on to Allegro
> functions, have them pass on ALLEGRO_COLOR and do the conversion
> afterwards.
Well... you change from having to do the conversion once at the vertex 
array creation time, to having to do conversion every time the vertex 
array is drawn. Plus theres the issue of where to store the transformed 
vertices, since they can't be transformed in place, I'd have to make 
(yet another) buffer to store the transformed vertices in.

I suppose I already do that for indexed primitives and old cards for 
D3D... but I don't really laud those as great successes on my part: they 
are unavoidable consequences of D3D being... a suboptimal API to do 
program in. Now at least for this color business this is avoidable via 
the ALLEGRO_PRIM_COLOR trick... I don't really think it's that bad, and 
the reason for its existence can be (and already is, I think) documented.

In principle, I could make the conversion work, but it'll be giving the 
D3D driver the finger. As much as I don't like it, I don't want to make 
it too disadvantaged against.

I could bring back the vertex buffer paradigm which would go around 
this... but nobody wants that :P

-SiegeLord