TODO.md

TO DO

Features

Expose the API for extracting data from PLY files to end users.

Add functions for converting other shapes into a TriangleMesh:

• Cone
• Curve
• Cylinder
• Disk
• Hyperboloid
• Paraboloid
• Sphere

Strict mode vs. permissive mode

• Strict mode errors on unknown statements/parameters, permissive mode ignores them.
• Both still error on malformed tokens, missing args & required params, etc.

Callback-based parsing interface

• For use if you have your own scene data model that you want to populate and don't want to create our data model as an intermediate step.
• Separate the existing scene construction code into a SceneBuilder class, Parser should only invoke callbacks. SceneBuilder should be the default callback handler.

Performance

Reduce memory usage while parsing large attribute values, e.g. the vertex and index arrays for a large triangle mesh.

Reduce memory usage for the in-memory scene representation:

• Transforms are represented by a pair of matrices, but we only need one matrix if the scene isn't animated.
• Many transform matrices will have a bottom row of 0,0,0,1 - perhaps can we use a 4x3 matrix instead, for those cases?
• Try using a packed (compressed?) representation, with decoding done in accessor methods?
• Use a disk cache.

Reduce overall number of memory allocations.

• Parsing itself doesn't do very many, but constructing the scene representation does a lot.

Improve IO performance:

• Use a background thread and/or async I/O calls to load the next buffer while we're parsing the current buffer.

Code structure

Factor out checks for required params into a function.

pbrtinfo example

• Rename main.cpp to pbrtinfo.cpp & move into an examples directory.

Code clean-up:

• Merge the tokenizer class into the parser class.
• Move as much as possible out of the header and into the cpp file.
• Make set_error() return bool so it can be used as part of a return statement.
• Remove any unused code.