little readme changes; added an architecture doc

ARCHITECTURE.MD

@@ -0,0 +1,174 @@
+This document gives an overview of the architecture of librw.
+
+Disclaimer: Some of these design decision were taken over from original RW,
+some are my own. I only take partial responsibility.
+
+Differently from original RW, librw has no neat separation into modules.
+Some things could be made optional, but in particular RW's RpWorld
+plugin is integrated with everything else.
+
+# Plugins
+
+To extend structs with custom data,
+RW (and librw) provides a plugin mechanism
+for certain structs.
+This can be used to tack more data onto a struct
+and register custom streaming functions.
+Plugins must be registered before any instance
+of that struct is allocated.
+
+# Pipelines
+
+RW's pipeline architecture was designed for very flexible data flow.
+Unfortunately for RW most of the rendering pipeline moved into the GPU
+causing RW's pipeline architecture to be severely overengineered.
+
+librw's pipeline architecture is therefore much simplified
+and only implements what is actually needed,
+but the name *pipeline* is retained.
+
+Three pipelines are implemented in librw itself:
+Default, Skin, MatFX (only env map so far).
+Others can be implemented by applications using librw.
+
+# RW Objects
+
+## Frame
+
+A Frame is an orientation in space, arranged in a hierarchy.
+Camera, Lights and Atomics can be attached to it.
+It has two matrices: a (so called) model matrix,
+which is relative to its parent,
+and a local transformation matrix (LTM) which is relative to the world.
+The LTM is updated automatically as needed whenever the hierarchy gets dirty.
+
+## Camera
+
+A Camera is attached to a Frame to position it in space
+and has a framebuffer and a z-buffer attached to render to.
+Rendering is started by `beginUpdate` and ended by `endUpdate`.
+This sets up things like framebuffers and matrices
+so that the Camera's raster can be rendered to.
+
+## Light
+
+Lights are attached to a Frame to position it in space.
+They are used to light Atomics for rendering.
+Different types of light are possible.
+
+## Geometry
+
+A Geometry contains the raw geometry data that can be rendered.
+It has a list of materials that are applied to its triangles.
+The latter are sorted by materials into meshes for easier instancing.
+
+## Atomic
+
+An Atomic is attached to a Frame to position it in space
+and references a Geometry.
+Atomics are the objects that are rendered by pipelines.
+
+## Clump
+
+A Clump is a container of Atomics, Lights and Cameras.
+Clumps can be read from and written to DFF files.
+Rendering a Clump will be render all of its Atomics.
+
+# Engine
+
+Due to the versatility of librw,
+there are three levels of code:
+Platform indpendent code,
+platform specific code,
+and render device specific code.
+
+The second category does not exist in original RW,
+but because librw is supposed to be able to
+convert between all sorts of platform specific files,
+the code for that has to be available no matter
+the render platform used.
+The common interface for all device-indepenent
+platform code is the `Driver` struct.
+The `Engine` struct has an array with one for each platform.
+
+The render device specific code
+is used for actually rendering something to the screen.
+The common interface for the device-dependent
+code is the `Device` struct and the `Engine`
+struct only has a single one, as there can only be one render device 
+(i.e. you cannot select D3D or OpenGL at runtime).
+
+Thus when implementing a new backend
+you have to implement the `Driver` and `Device` interfaces.
+But do note that the `Driver` can be extended with plugins!
+
+# Driver
+
+The driver is mostly concerned with conversion
+between platform independent data to platform dependent one, and vice versa.
+This concerns the following two cases.
+
+## Raster, Images
+
+Images contain platform independent uncompressed pixel data.
+Rasters contain platform dependent (and possibly compressed) pixel data.
+A driver has to be able to convert an image to a raster for the purposes of loading textures
+from files or having them converted from foreign rasters.
+Converting from rasters to images is not absolutely necessary but it's needed e.g. for taking screenshots.
+librw has a set of default raster formats that the platform is
+expected to implement for the most part, however not all have to be supported necessarily.
+A driver is also free to implement its own formats;
+this is done for texture compression.
+
+Rasters have different types,
+`TEXTURE` and `CAMERATEXTURE` rasters can be used as textures,
+`CAMERA` and `CAMERATEXTURE` can be used as render targets,
+`ZBUFFER` is used as a depth-buffer.
+
+## Pipelines
+
+A librw ObjPipeline implements essentially
+an instance stage which converts platform independent geometry
+to a format that can efficiently be rendered,
+and a render stage that actually renders it.
+(There is also an uninstance function,
+but this is only used to convert platform specific geometry back to the generic format
+and hence is not necessary.)
+
+# Device
+
+The device implements everything that is actually needed for rendering.
+
+This includes starting, handling and closing the rendering device,
+setting render states,
+allocating and destroying buffers and textures,
+im2d and im3d rendering,
+and the render functions of the pipelines.
+
+## System
+
+The `system` function implements certain device requests
+from the engine (why these aren't separate functions I don't know, RW design).
+
+The `Engine` is started in different stages, at various points of which
+the render device gets different requests.
+At the end the device is initialized and ready for rendering.
+A similar but reverse sequence happens on shutdown.
+
+Subsystems (screens) and video modes are queried through
+the `system` by the application before the device is started.
+
+## Immediate mode
+
+Im2d and im3d are immediate-mode style rendering interface.
+
+## Pipelines
+
+For instancing the typical job is to allocate and fill
+a struct to hold some data about an atomic,
+an array of structs for all the meshes,
+and vertex and index buffers to hold geometry for rendering.
+
+The render function will render the previously instanced
+data by doing a per-object setup and then iterating over
+and rendering all the meshes.

README.md

@@ -4,16 +4,21 @@ librw
 This library is supposed to be a re-implementation of RenderWare graphics,
 or a good part of it anyway.
 
-It is intended to be cross-platform in two senses eventually:
+It is intended to be cross-platform in two senses:
 support rendering on different platforms similar to RW;
 supporting all file formats for all platforms at all times and provide
 way to convert to all other platforms.
 
-File formats are already supported rather well, although rasters
+Supported file formats are DFF and TXD for PS2, D3D8, D3D9 and Xbox.
-as used by TXD files still need some work, especially for PS2.
+Not all pre-instanced PS2 DFFs are supported.
+BSP is not supported at all.
 
-As for rendering, D3D9 and OpenGL 3 work somewhat well but both still need
+For rendering we have D3D9 and OpenGL (>=2.1, ES >= 2.0) backends.
-work. Rendering some things on the PS2 is working as a test only.
+Rendering some things on the PS2 is working as a test only.
+
+# Uses
+
+librw can be used for rendering [GTA](https://github.com/gtamodding/re3).
 
 # Building