Game Development Community

API consistency and the word "Primitive

by Valador, Inc. · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 09/19/2005 (9:12 am) · 1 replies

Not trying to sound nit picky, but I think this may cause some mistakes for people.

the use of the word "primitiveCount" in the function:

GFXPrimitiveBuffer(GFXDevice *device, U32 indexCount, U32 primitiveCount, GFXBufferType bufferType)

has a very different meaning from the numPrimitives field in:

GFXPrimitive.numPrimitives

In rendering a cube, the value primitiveCount = 1 and the value for numPrimitives = 12. I think for me, as a DirectX programmer, the word primitive already means "how many total triangles".

Again, not trying to be picky, but it caused d3d errors for me and I thought maybe it could save some time for others.

~Eric P

#1
09/19/2005 (9:24 am)
I read Primitive and think of a sphere, cone, cylinder, etc... from 3d modeling.
Perhaps primitiveCount is the "object" definition of primitive, and numPrimitives is the "poly" definition of primitive.