Re: duplicating trimesh data con't

[Keith W. <kw...@cs...>]

On Tue, 3 Aug 2004, James W. Walker wrote:

> Keith Wiley <kw...@cs...> wrote:
>
> >What I get in the debugger is unique addresses for the two shaders, but
> >the same address for the two textures.  So copying the trimesh data
> >creates a second new shader, but only copies a pointer or reference to the
> >texture.  I am right so far, right?
>
> That should not be the case.  Duplicating a texture shader also
> duplicates the textures.  The CVS log shows that it has been so since
> Feb. 26 2003.

Dammit, you're right of course.  I accidentally got the shaders from each
trimesh and then got the textures from the shaders, but, oops, got it from
the same shader both times.  So my debugging code had a bug.  :-)

Ah me.  Well, at least that explains some things.  Like I said, I'm
getting multipled copies in the profiler.

So now I need to figure out how to copy a trimesh and copy its REFERENCES
to shaders and textures.  I'll chew on that one for a while.

Ultimately what I'm doing, if you're curious, is creating one prototype
tree object for a forest, and then copying it dozens of times to make
individual trees.  I want them all to link back to the same texture of
course.

Someone mentioned that I could avoid copying the meshes by using transofmr
objects but I am intentionally unioning the meshes of any given terrain
tile into a single large mesh so as to reduce the number of objects in the
world.  As a result of this, each "object" for a tree species is actually
several trees located in various locations on a given terrain tile.  Since
the placements of the trees in a tile are random, each tile has an object
with a unique geometry, so the transform object approach won't work, I
need to make copies of the trees so I can union their trimeshes...but I
still want them to all use just one texture for all the objects on all the
tiles.

________________________________________________________________________
Keith Wiley                                kw...@cs...
http://www.unm.edu/~keithw                 http://www.mp3.com/KeithWiley

"Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn his lesson,
that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to
aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy."
                                           --  Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland
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