This function greatly simplifies the use of effects by making it so you
can call this function in a simple loop. This reduces boilerplate and
makes drawing with effects much easier. The gs_effect_loop function
will now automatically handle all the functions required to do drawing.
---------------------
Before:
gs_technique_t *technique = gs_effect_get_technique("technique");
size_t passes = gs_technique_begin(technique);
for (size_t pass = 0; pass < passes; pass++) {
gs_technique_begin_pass(technique, pass);
[draw]
gs_technique_end_pass(technique);
}
gs_technique_end(technique);
---------------------
After:
while (gs_effect_loop(effect, "technique")) {
[draw]
}
This Fixes a minor flaw with the API where data had to always be mutable
to be usable by the API.
Functions that do not modify the fundamental underlying data of a
structure should be marked as constant, both for safety and to signify
that the parameter is input only and will not be modified by the
function using it.
Typedef pointers are unsafe. If you do:
typedef struct bla *bla_t;
then you cannot use it as a constant, such as: const bla_t, because
that constant will be to the pointer itself rather than to the
underlying data. I admit this was a fundamental mistake that must
be corrected.
All typedefs that were pointer types will now have their pointers
removed from the type itself, and the pointers will be used when they
are actually used as variables/parameters/returns instead.
This does not break ABI though, which is pretty nice.
Similar to the shader functions, the effect parameter functions take
the effect as a parameter. However, the effect parameter is pretty
pointless, because the effect parameter.. parameter stores the effect
pointer interally.
See, it can sometimes be a bit confusing. These functions should
definitely not fail under normal circumstances, and these errors may
affect the user and/or application in some way.
The API used to be designed in such a way to where it would expect
exports for each individual source/output/encoder/etc. You would export
functions for each and it would automatically load those functions based
on a specific naming scheme from the module.
The idea behind this was that I wanted to limit the usage of structures
in the API so only functions could be used. It was an interesting idea
in theory, but this idea turned out to be flawed in a number of ways:
1.) Requiring exports to create sources/outputs/encoders/etc meant that
you could not create them by any other means, which meant that
things like faruton's .net plugin would become difficult.
2.) Export function declarations could not be checked, therefore if you
created a function with the wrong parameters and parameter types,
the compiler wouldn't know how to check for that.
3.) Required overly complex load functions in libobs just to handle it.
It makes much more sense to just have a load function that you call
manually. Complexity is the bane of all good programs.
4.) It required that you have functions of specific names, which looked
and felt somewhat unsightly.
So, to fix these issues, I replaced it with a more commonly used API
scheme, seen commonly in places like kernels and typical C libraries
with abstraction. You simply create a structure that contains the
callback definitions, and you pass it to a function to register that
definition (such as obs_register_source), which you call in the
obs_module_load of the module.
It will also automatically check the structure size and ensure that it
only loads the required values if the structure happened to add new
values in an API change.
The "main" source file for each module must include obs-module.h, and
must use OBS_DECLARE_MODULE() within that source file.
Also, started writing some doxygen documentation in to the main library
headers. Will add more detailed documentation as I go.
jp9000