126 lines
5.1 KiB
ObjectPascal

{
Copyright 2005-2012 Sandy Barbour and Ben Supnik All rights reserved. See
license.txt for usage. X-Plane SDK Version: 2.1.1
}
UNIT XPLMInstance;
INTERFACE
{
This API provides instanced drawing of X-Plane objects (.obj files). In
contrast to old drawing APIs, which required you to draw your own objects
per-frame, the instancing API allows you to simply register an OBJ for
drawing, then move or manipulate it later (as needed).
This provides one tremendous benefit: it keeps all dataref operations for
your object in one place. Because datarefs are main thread only, allowing
dataref access anywhere is a serious performance bottleneck for the
simulator---the whole simulator has to pause and wait for each dataref
access. This performance penalty will only grow worse as X-Plane moves
toward an ever more heavily multithreaded engine.
The instancing API allows X-Plane to isolate all dataref manipulations for
all plugin object drawing to one place, potentially providing huge
performance gains.
Here's how it works:
When an instance is created, it provides a list of all datarefs you want to
manipulate in for the OBJ in the future. This list of datarefs replaces the
ad-hoc collections of dataref objects previously used by art assets. Then,
per-frame, you can manipulate the instance by passing in a "block" of
packed floats representing the current values of the datarefs for your
instance. (Note that the ordering of this set of packed floats must exactly
match the ordering of the datarefs when you created your instance.)
}
USES
XPLMDefs, XPLMScenery;
{$A4}
{___________________________________________________________________________
* Instance Creation and Destruction
___________________________________________________________________________}
{
Registers and unregisters instances.
}
TYPE
{
XPLMInstanceRef
An opaque handle to an instance.
}
XPLMInstanceRef = pointer;
PXPLMInstanceRef = ^XPLMInstanceRef;
{
XPLMCreateInstance
XPLMCreateInstance creates a new instance, managed by your plug-in, and
returns a handle to the instance. A few important requirements:
* The object passed in must be fully loaded and returned from the XPLM
before you can create your instance; you cannot pass a null obj ref, nor
can you change the ref later.
* If you use any custom datarefs in your object, they must be registered
before the object is loaded. This is true even if their data will be
provided via the instance dataref list.
* The instance dataref array must be a valid ptr to an array of at least
one item that is null terminated. That is, if you do not want any
datarefs, you must passa ptr to an array with a null item. You cannot
pass null for this.
}
FUNCTION XPLMCreateInstance(
obj : XPLMObjectRef;
datarefs : PXPLMString) : XPLMInstanceRef;
cdecl; external XPLM_DLL;
{
XPLMDestroyInstance
XPLMDestroyInstance destroys and deallocates your instance; once called,
you are still responsible for releasing the OBJ ref.
Tip: you can release your OBJ ref after you call XPLMCreateInstance as long
as you never use it again; the instance will maintain its own reference to
the OBJ and the object OBJ be deallocated when the instance is destroyed.
}
PROCEDURE XPLMDestroyInstance(
instance : XPLMInstanceRef);
cdecl; external XPLM_DLL;
{___________________________________________________________________________
* Instance Manipulation
___________________________________________________________________________}
{
XPLMInstanceSetPosition
Updates both the position of the instance and all datarefs you registered
for it. Call this from a flight loop callback or UI callback.
__DO NOT__ call XPLMInstanceSetPosition from a drawing callback; the whole
point of instancing is that you do not need any drawing callbacks. Setting
instance data from a drawing callback may have undefined consequences, and
the drawing callback hurts FPS unnecessarily.
The memory pointed to by the data pointer must be large enough to hold one
float for every data ref you have registered, and must contain valid
floating point data.
BUG: before X-Plane 11.50, if you have no dataref registered, you must
still pass a valid pointer for data and not null.
}
PROCEDURE XPLMInstanceSetPosition(
instance : XPLMInstanceRef;
new_position : PXPLMDrawInfo_t;
data : PSingle);
cdecl; external XPLM_DLL;
IMPLEMENTATION
END.