[Openvrml-develop] Our SFImage story

[Braden M. <br...@en...>]

Right now, we store SFImages as an array of bytes, rather than as an array
of 4-byte ints as they are represented in VRML syntax. This is
problematic:

  * The ECMAScript binding includes access to the pixel data array--as
    4-byte ints. It looks like we currently punt on this.

  * PixelTexture's (the only pre-defined node type with an SFImage) image
    field is exposed, so an hypothetical EAI should be able to access it.

In either of those cases, our current design would require dynamically
converting to the 4-byte-element format when one of these bindings
attempts to access the data. That seems extremely likely to have
unacceptable performance.

I think we need to store the integer format in VrmlSFImage. The byte
format can remain there in parallel, though I suspect we might eventually
want to move it to a cache in the renderer.

-- 
Braden N. McDaniel                              e-mail: br...@en...
<http://endoframe.com>                          Jabber: br...@ja...