Hardware Instanced Billboard sprites

[DigitalLibrarian]

We need a system that uses hardware instancing, to create billboard sprites, or some equivalent. InstancingClass will provide the hardware instancing and give us better than O(n) vertex buffer sends.

Previous implementations of this exist somewhere. However, they actually send the same texture for each sprite. Our instancing should really avoid sending that with every draw call.

[DigitalLibrarian]

This would be useful for :

• Showing biting relationships in SimulationScreen
• Showing death in SimulationScreen

Basically any kind of transient event that we want to show could merely trigger one of these to display for a while (perhaps with particle system-style transformations that occur based on particle age).

[DigitalLibrarian]

Transitions and fading like a particle in a particle system would be a cheap and effective technique to add. Perhaps this could be one of the requirements of our particle system?

[DigitalLibrarian]

The current need is to create some visual cue for birth, deaths, and bites in SimulationScreen. Each of these use cases require a cool down and age-based transform. This is really a particle system we are talking about.