Memory Models
Much of the memory used by Rhodonite is allocated as a huge memory pool called Buffer, which is allocated to each component and material as follows
Buffers are divided into areas called BufferView, and BufferView is further divided into Accessor areas for management. The Rhodonite memory model is inspired by the glTF format memory model.
It is this memory management mechanism that allows the shaders to properly fetch data after it has been sent to the GPU as a texture. The byteStride and byte alignment between the data is properly adjusted so that the shaders can fetch the data efficiently.
Rhodonite manages memory at three levels of granularity: Buffer, BufferView, and Accessor. Classes with the same names are provided to facilitate memory management in many applications.
It represents one large contiguous buffer pool. It can be thought of as the equivalent of glTF's Buffer.
This class represents a portion of the memory area managed by the Buffer class and manages that portion of the memory area. It can be thought of as the equivalent of glTF's BufferView. The reason why the BufferView class exists is that there are many cases where you want to divide a huge Buffer into separate areas for different purposes and manage them.
This class represents a portion of the memory area managed by the BufferView class and manages that portion of the memory area. It can be thought of as the equivalent of glTF's Accessor.
The functional difference from BufferView is that Accessor already knows the units and methods of data access to the memory area under its management.
Direct data read/write operations, such as vertex data manipulation, would be performed using this Accessor class. Also, by using the method takeOne, one piece of data can be retrieved as a TypedArray and held in a separate class. This acquired memory area remains unchanged and remains part of Accessor (originally the huge ArrayBuffer pool that Buffer represents), and no memory copying is done.
One of Rhodonite's unique features is its "blittable memory architecture. Using the memory management mechanism described so far, the Bufer class manages contiguous memory areas as a huge ArrayBuffer pool. Then, some of the data is extracted using the takeOne method of the Accessor class and assigned as the storage area for the individual properties of components and materials.
This means that when you change a property of a component or material, that change actually rewrites the inside of the huge ArrayBuffer memory pool represented by the Buffer class.
The beauty of this is that with this mechanism, after the various library calculations, the ArrayBuffer memory pool indicated by Buffer is simply sent to the GPU as a floating-point texture, and the GPU has access to almost all data through the texture. It is.
Another benefit is that the cost of setting up uniform variables (copying values to retrieve them and the overhead of WebGL's uniform function itself) is eliminated.
On mobile devices, the number of uniform variables available can be very small, which can cause difficulties when passing large amounts of parameters, such as the bone matrix of a skeletal animation. Rhodonite with its blittable memory architecture can easily overcome such limitations by allowing floating point textures to be used to pass parameters to shaders.