Re: G3DKit.info - renderer questions

On Thursday, October 31, 2002, at 04:10  Uhr, Brent Gulanowski wrote:
> On Wednesday, October 30, 2002, at 05:23  PM, Philippe C.D. Robert 
> wrote:
>
>> My terminology here is:
>>
>> o [action] a highlevel "job" to be performed on the scene graph, ie. 
>> culling data for the active frustum. This is thus generic.
>>
>> o [task] a specific low-level "job" performed by the render engine, 
>> ie. switching a state (simple) or drawing arbitrary geometry 
>> (complex). This is thus specific.
>>
>> Do you think this is a bad choice? I can see both possibilities, as 
>> long as it is used consistently...:-)
>
> I'm pretty sure that, wherever you slice it, the word "action" means 
> some particular activity, usually a well-defined activity or process. 
> An action has no ambiguity. It also has little or no implicit impact 
> on a state. It may have no consequences at all. A task is different in 
> both ways -- it usually does not define the particular process 
> followed to complete the task (which may be actions, or may be 
> sub-tasks which are themselves composed of specific actions), and it 
> does imply a meaningful change of state. There's a grey area between 
> them, but in this case, I recommend swapping the terms.

Well, if you ie. have a look at Inventor then you see that there a 
SoAction is described as follows:

"SoAction is the abstract base class for all actions. Classes derived 
from SoAction define operations to be applied at each node encountered 
during traversal of a scene graph. The function that gets called to 
implement the action for a particular node type is determined by a 
lookup table in the global database."

The SoGLRenderAction class for example traverses a scene graph and 
renders it using the OpenGL graphics library. Thus I'd rather keep the 
terminology, otherwise it gets confusing...

Anyone?

-Phil
--
Philippe C.D. Robert
http://www.nice.ch/~phip