CF renderer blog post sketch

Notes.txt

 renderer
- sprite as pod type
- Online atlas compiler
- SDF shapes 
    - Local aa
    - Local rounding
    - Alpha discard cutouts and shrink wrap OBB quads
- Polylines with SDF compatible triangulation
- On demand glyph rasterization
    - No need to declare utf8 codes up-front, extremely efficient storage for blur/bold/italic, multiple languages, multiple fonts, etc
    - Memory cost only scales relative to what you actually render
- Text markup and render system
    - Box wrapping
    - Vertical layouts
- Stream all verts dynamically to the GPU (no static meshes internally)
- SDL_Gpu backend
    - Shader, vert buffer, texture buffer, uniforms
    - Organized into “passes”, static layout of params all uploaded together as a bundle
- GLES3 backend
    - Legacy API for web builds
    - On demand triple buffers of mesh or texture updates
    - Organized in a similar manner to passes API in SDL_Gpu
- Shader abstraction
    - Truly cross platform, runtime (or offline) compileable shaders
    - Material abstraction to match material values (key name and typically a float/vector/matrix value) to uniforms and build a memcpy’able block of data for uniform uploads
    - High level “draw” fragment shader abstraction for setting up shaders on sprites or canvas
- Canvas based render paradigm
    - Render to a canvas
    - Blit one canvas to another
    - Apply custom shader to canvases
- Internal geometry details
    - All draw-API shapes go through the “sprite batch”, but really are often just packed implicitly defied shapes
    - Like circle, capsule, box, etc 
    - Sprites get sorted around, and if an actual sprite with a texture then the texture is automagically stuffed into an atlas with other items you’ve rendered recently
    - Text glyphs are just sprites generated and stuffed into atlases on the fly
    - The camera hooks into sprites and modifies verts before they sent to the GPU. However, for shapes the world space positions are packed into vertex attributes for SDF rendering
- Built in (to draw-api) helpers for screen to world translation for points, mouse, and screen bounds