Other Renderables

[Daniel van Vugt]

Does anyone have a plan for how to represent Renderables (or 
SceneElement) that don't have a buffer()? I'm thinking about dynamically 
generated elements that don't have buffer streams and are not fixed 
resolution. Such elements are either pre-generated (once) or even 
produced entirely on the GPU as a shader program.

The first example is the title bar in demo-shell. It's made of a single 
texture that is mip-mapped, repeated, reflected, scaled and filtered 
dynamically according to the window size (and eventually according to 
display DPI too).

A second example is a software cursor or touchspots that you might want 
to generate at hi-DPI and then mipmap/scale according to which display 
it's on.

The obvious answer (maybe) is that a Renderable (or SceneElement 
whatever) needs to provide its own draw function in the case that there 
is no buffer(). That might also nicely solve the problem of "is there 
anything on screen that can't be overlayed?" -- "yes because one or more 
visible renderables don't provide a buffer() but instead only provide a 
gl_render()".

A second possible solution is to just define enum RenderType {buffer, 
titlebar, fixed_texture, otherthings} and leave it up to the 
Compositor/Renderer to implement all the types.

- Daniel