This section gives a brief overview of how assets are managed in Simulant
When using Simulant you'll inevitably need to create, manipulate and delete many different kinds of object. These include Cameras, Viewports, Actors, Stages and Pipelines.
All of these types of objects have a counterpart ID type, an instance of which identifies a single object. These IDs can be exchanged with an object manager for access to an object. It's important to understand that the manager that created the object, retains ownership of it.
For example, you can create a Mesh (which is an Asset) like this:
MeshID mid = stage->assets->new_mesh();
and later, you can exchange the ID for a MeshPtr like this:
MeshPtr mesh = stage->mesh(mid);
Assets and StageNodes both use this ID system, but they behave in different ways:
If you store a pointer to an Asset, the reference count will never hit zero and the asset will never be freed which is why storing an ID is prefered.
Storing pointers to StageNodes doesn't suffer the same problem, but if you store IDs instead you can check to see whether or not the StageNode still exists before accessing the pointer:
smlt::ActorID id = stage->new_actor();
if(stage->has_actor()) {
// OK, the actor is still there
smlt::ActorPtr ptr = stage->actor(id);
ptr->move_to(x, y, z);
// etc...
}
It is important that you don't hold on to asset pointers for longer than you need to.
The recommended approach is to wrap accesses to assets in curly braces or to get a reference and use it in a single line, for example:
// ... code ...
{ //Start a scope block
auto mesh = stage->assets->mesh(mesh_id);
mesh->new_submesh_as_rectangle(...);
} //End of scope, releases the lock on the mesh
This minimizes the amount of time the lock is held and so reduces the chance of a deadlock.
Resource managers (e.g. those that manage Materials, Textures, Shaders, Meshes and Sounds) are reference counted. This means that you don't need to delete objects manually, other managers do not free objects automatically and you are required to delete the objects with a delete call:
stage->destroy_actor(actor_id);
StageNodes like Actors will not be released immediately. They will be destroyed after late_update() but before the render queue is constructed.
For more information see Refcounted Managers and Manual Managers