Changing number of triangles rendered

[Birkemose]

If I for some reason does not want to render as many triangles as I defined in enqueueTriangles, this seems not to be possible?

[slembcke]

Currently no. I've run into that problem twice now, and have considered adding a method to return unused buffer space back to the renderer. It wouldn't be hard. The renderer needs to track a couple extra variables to make it work though.

For the tilemap rendering, it has to loop over the tiles and count the non-empty tiles to calculate the triangle count. This was the first time it came up, and I didn't want to change the API just for tilemaps. The second time I zeroed out the unused parts of the triangle index array. I probably should have fixed it right then.

My thought was to make the API to look something like this. Do you have a better suggestion for a method name? I'd like to avoid using "return" in the name, but can't think of a better word.

// Request a safe number of primitives
CCRenderBuffer buffer = [renderer enqueueTriangles:quads*2 andVertexes:quads*4 withState:self.renderState globalSortOrder:0];

CCRenderBufferSet...(...)
CCRenderBufferSet...(...)
...

// Return the unused primitives to the renderer.
NSUInteger unusedQuads = quads - usedQuads;
[renderer returnUnusedTriangles:unusedQuads*2 andVertexes:unusedQuads*4];

[Birkemose]

Hmm ... not sure I would know how to use that.

I think I miss an "I am done" method. To stay in the openGL terminology, the sequence should be.

Get a triangle buffer (enqueTriangles)
Fill the vertex data (CCRenderBufferSetVertex)
Fill the indices (CCRenderBufferSetTriangle)
Tell the renderer I am done (missing function, taking number of triangles to render, default all)