Rendering

The rendering interface in ChatImproVR works as follows:

Plugins define a MeshHandle, which is just a name for the mesh we will upload. This name will be used in the Render component.

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
const CUBE_HANDLE: MeshHandle = MeshHandle::new(pkg_namespace!("Cube"));
}

Plugins send an UploadMesh message containing the MeshHandle and the desired mesh data. This tells the rendering engine about the mesh data, so that we may later reference it by its MeshHandle.

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
io.send(&UploadMesh {
    mesh: cube(),
    id: CUBE_HANDLE,
});
}

To render a mesh, create an entity with the Transform and Render components. The Transform component specifies the position and orientation of the rendered mesh. This is available in shaders via the mat4 view uniform. The Render component specifies how the mesh is to be displayed; e.g. which primitive to use, indexing limites, etc. Note how we specify which MeshHandle to render!

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
io.create_entity()
    .add_component(Transform::identity());
    .add_component(Render::new(CUBE_HANDLE))
    .build();
}

NOTE: All rendering data is processed client-side; e.g. UploadMesh should be sent in ClientState.

See the cube example!

Defining meshes

Meshes are defined using vertices and indices. The default shader uses Vertex's uvw field to represent vertex color.

The Book

Rendering

Defining meshes