Good day,

 

I've recently hit a wall playing around with the rendering hooks: 
Suppose you have a fairly large (~500) collection of BlockStates and want to render them as a preview in the client world only - calling

BlockRendererDispatcher.renderBlock(IBlockState, BlockPos, IBlockAccess, BufferBuilder)

this many times during a

RenderWorldLastEvent

works in a way, but doesn't seem like the way to go, especially concerning optimization. 
I've had a look at some alternatives, those used by the mod Schematica for instance. However before I look into extending from RenderGlobal with my limited understanding of the engine itself,

I was interested in whether I've missed any obvious / recommended ways to go about this, as I am sure this has been done many times before. ?

Any suggestions are welcome, thanks for your time.~

Edited March 7, 20196 yr by simicats

You can cache the BufferBuilder results by doing the same thing that RenderChunk does. I’ll write you some example code in a bit because it’s relatively complicated and I have lots of experience but the basic idea is:

1) Render your data to your own BufferBuilder

2) Render your BufferBuilder from the event

3) Update the BufferBuilder when your data changes 

Hello Cadiboo and thanks for your response, I'm glad to have found an expert on the matter. =]

Caching a BufferBuilder sounds very reasonable, if you feel like leaving some code / reference: I'd be most interested in the general life cycle of said Buffer, from the size on creation to the render call in the event. 

Ideally you would do the block rebuilding off-thread or even multithreaded. I haven't done that in this example though.

https://gist.github.com/Cadiboo/753607e41ca4e2ca9e0ce3b928bab5ef

If you do multi-thread/off-thread your rebuilding, you will need to have proper thread safe code.

Edited March 6, 20196 yr by Cadiboo

Fantastic, this has been very insightful, thanks again for your help. =]