Getting a handle on things

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Chris Cederwall (ceder++at++pbi.net)
Thu, 14 Dec 1995 10:50:51 -0800


The idea of names vs. pointers to structures for getting
a handle on objects in the SceneGraph is a great discussion.

I have always leaned on the side of naming the Objects from
the very beggining. Then making sure that the loader is properly
seeing and passing on the naming to Performer...
Then either making a quick assosiative array with the name and
the pointer to the structure that got the name or just relying
on the getByName mechanism in Performer....

Speed wise let's say the maintaining the list of pointers is faster..
And doing your own name resolving is 'no problem'.

Let's take an example. Rudolph's red nose. You want to make it glow
and change its material. So you name the material "RedNose_Material".
There is a very good chance that when you change the material all the
lights on the Xmas tree will change with it! That's okay, we expected
that to happen. So then we say explicitly when loading the the named
object is not be involved in any attribute sharing by the PFD routines.

Well, that will keep Rudolph's Nose separate from the Xmas tree lights.
But it feels a little too constricting. What about making everything
in the entire sceneGraph changeable?? it would mean maintaining a very
non-FLAT graph.

Has anybody thought about the ways in which every attribute can changed
without disabling a lot of the flattening and sharing routines in the
loader??

-- 
Chris Cederwall
ceder++at++pbi.net
415.442.4952

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