Eg, a chunk of vert info that can be passed enmass to OpenGL... but still editable without jumping through hoops (pointer casting and poking for instance).
Maybe you missed the "CTYPE" above, which isn't a spelling mistake? A normal TYPE, aka an OBJECT, has header info (at least) and an array-of-TYPES is actually an array of references/addresses of objects (other than simple types?). The point is that the actual data is not contiguous and would need packing before being passed to opengl. There are other situations, apart from opengl stuff, where c-type arrays would be useful and/or needed for performance.
I would be surprised if Mark doesn't already recognise this requirement since any 3D engine created without it is going to be either inflexible or slow or both! His silence on this worries me and with the lack of action in these forums I'm beginning to wonder if bmax has not proved very popular. I hope to be wrong but just in case I'm spending this week learning cocoa.
Maybe you missed the "CTYPE" above, which isn't a spelling mistake? A normal TYPE, aka an OBJECT, has header info (at least) and an array-of-TYPES is actually an array of references/addresses of objects (other than simple types?). The point is that the actual data is not contiguous and would need packing before being passed to opengl. There are other situations, apart from opengl stuff, where c-type arrays would be useful and/or needed for performance.
I would be surprised if Mark doesn't already recognise this requirement since any 3D engine created without it is going to be either inflexible or slow or both! His silence on this worries me and with the lack of action in these forums I'm beginning to wonder if bmax has not proved very popular. I hope to be wrong but just in case I'm spending this week learning cocoa.