Been chipping away at this endeavor while on vacation and honing in on what I’m trying to accomplish.. It appears StorageBuffer backing for the WebGPU side would need additional changes to “plug and play” into GLSL that’s translated but still would work if written all in WGSL. For now everything is backed with a one-segment arena, one array buffer, that has a view on top representing all the internal types including variable sized arrays, nested structs.
Here is a demo of using it to sit on top of Mesh thin instances and create a stronger “handle” on instances that include any additional metadata you’d want to define for the instance and not just the mat4 translation. This is just one use case but something I’m leaning towards being a good candidate for extension since the thin instance logic can be applied to other parts of the framework like particles, textrenderers, potentially lights with pbr
Here is a PG piggybacking off thin instances
And here is a PG implementing the instance draw call manually with the backing transform data used in the vertex shader