Notes on Legacy Geometry

[WestLangley]

r100 has been mentioned as the target release for removing support for rendering THREE.Geometry.

That means you can instantiate an instance of THREE.Geometry, but you will have to convert it to THREE.BufferGeometry prior to adding it to the scene.

By my notes, the remaining examples where Geometry is rendered are webgl_materials.html and svg_sandbox.html. I believe in all other examples where Geometry is used, Geometry is instantiated, but not rendered.

Also, to do is #14608 -- an important one.

I would also suggest renaming THREE.Geometry to THREE.LegacyGeometry.

At some point, THREE.BufferGeometry can become THREE.Geometry, but that would be in the distant future.

[Mugen87]

THREE.Geometry is an integral part of THREE.Octree. After analyzing the code today, I think it's better to remove THREE.Octree and both related examples for now and refer instead to the originial repository right here: https://github.com/collinhover/threeoctree

In general, I don't like the fact that code like THREE.Octree or THREE.OBJLoader2 resides in two repositories. IMHO, I think it's better to have a single repo and avoid to mirror the code into three.js. Especially if the code is non-trivial and the original developers do not provide support anymore. The current recommended release for THREE.Octree is R60 😑.

[WestLangley]

I think it's better to remove THREE.Octree and both related examples for now

/ping @mrdoob Is that OK with you?

[Mugen87]

side note^^: webgl_materials.html and svg_sandbox.html use BufferGeoemtry now.

[aardgoose]

Presumably DirectGeometry is also being deprecated.
Will all the fromGeometry() and fromDirectGeometry() code be removed from BufferGeometry

[Mugen87]

The conversion between both geometry types should still be possible. So we still need BufferGeometry.fromGeometry(), Geometry.fromBufferGeometry() and thus DirectGeometry.

The next step is to stop rendering Geometry. At some point, it's not valid to have Geometry entities in the scene graph anymore.

[aardgoose]

I understand the direction of these changes, it just leaves a lot of code in BufferGeometry that maybe could be moved elsewhere to avoid bloating builds that don't use Geometry.

[mrdoob]

I think it's better to remove THREE.Octree

/ping @mrdoob Is that OK with you?

Yep! We should remove Octree 👌

[Mugen87]

By my notes, the remaining examples where Geometry is rendered are webgl_materials.html and svg_sandbox.html.

webgl_modifier_subdivision is another one^^. Fixing...

[WestLangley]

r100 has been mentioned as the target release for removing support for rendering THREE.Geometry.

@mrdoob Do you want to remove the ability of the renderers to render Geometry in r100 or r101?

I would also suggest renaming THREE.Geometry to THREE.LegacyGeometry.

@mrdoob How do you feel about that? I would be inclined to do that now, in r100.

[mrdoob]

Lets leave it for r101 as it'll require a fair amount of testing.
Renaming to THREE.LegacyGeometry sounds good.

[Mugen87]

What about the geometry generators? Should we also rename them like so:

BoxGeometry → BoxLegacyGeometry