So, I was messing around with girlpower’s VLY and came across a bit that made me realize (again) how I don’t understand stuff as much as I’d like to, grrr. This:
What is it doing, actually? It only - visually, by connection - outputs TextureCoordinates but there seems to be something under hood as deleting it messes with the mesh itself.
indeed that is a tricky one: when you delete that VertexBuffer (Split) you also remove the device for its Mesh (Split) connected upstream (which the vertexbuffersplit magically provides). and what happens is that the Mesh (Split) no longer returns Indices on its second output…see?
EDIT
and mesh/vertexbuffer operations are done on the gpu so they need a so called device. usually nodes that need a device take that from the renderer that it somewhere connected downstream. but there are some nodes like vertexbuffersplit, pipet, boundingbox,…that don’t have a downstream renderer and those get their device magically via their Device as you can see in the inspektor where -1 means: gimme any device.
@sanch, who made the patch is using the original data from a grid (index buffer and texture coordinates) to build the grid mesh. the only thing which is generated is the positions of the mesh (perlin noise), the rest does not need to be changed, so its just copied over from the original grid.
Ah, I see (literally, indices:)
Thanks, guys