RenderStates

RenderStates are a concept Mojang introduced to Minecraft in the 1.21.x versions, used to hold information about how the world should be rendered.

Overview

With Mojang's move to separate the rendering thread from the game thread, some changes were needed to the way rendering took place.

Previously, renderers were given the entire object they were rendering (such as the entity), and they held onto it the entire time they were performing their rendering. This posed a problem, however, because the object could be modified by the game thread while the renderer was performing its rendering. This meant that moving rendering off to another thread was not possible, and so some changes had to be made.

Enter: RenderStates

To solve this, Mojang introduced the concept of RenderStates.
These are objects that hold information about how the world should be rendered, created at the start of the render pass.

GeckoLib extends on these objects with its own interface: GeoRenderState. This allows for extensible data management through the use of DataTickets. GeckoLib then passes this object around to everywhere GeckoLib allows developers to interface with the library, contained within the RenderPassInfo.

Usage

When rendering, if you need to access any data from your animatable object at the time of rendering, you will have to store that data in the RenderState instance, using a DataTicket.

GeckoLib provides a number of places where you can store data in a RenderState:

• In your GeoRenderer: #addRenderData
• In your GeoModel: #addAdditionalStateData
• In a GeoRenderLayer: #addRenderData

info

You are encouraged to add the data in the place that is closest to where you will be using it.

Example Usage

Example Usage

Below we add some data to the render state for entity in our GeoEntityRenderer:

@Override
public void addRenderData(MyEntity animatable, Void relatedObject, R renderState, float partialTick) {
    renderState.addGeckoLibData(ModDataTickets.IS_TAMED, animatable.hasOwner());
}

Then, we can use it when rendering:

@Override
public void adjustModelBonesForRender(RenderPassInfo<R> renderPassInfo, BoneSnapshots snapshots) {
    final boolean isTamed = renderPassInfo.getGeckolibData(ModDataTickets.IS_TAMED);
    //...
}

DataTickets

GeckoLib allows developers to attach and retrieve arbitrary data on RenderStates using DataTickets.

See the DataTickets page for more information.