I think we don't yet have an actual global concept of opacity in our shaders -- we have tint, which can do opacity, but only for textured assets. Maybe worth making an issue for this (something like drawingContext2D's globalAlpha but for WebGL) and not putting too much effort into it here until that's added?

Also, should texture be in here too?

+1 Global opacity issue (discussion stage sounds most applicable?)

hey @davepagurek @ksen0, yeah dropped opacity for now, can open a discussion for the webgl globalAlpha thing
texture i'd keep though, it's per-material and the renderer can actually bind it per part

Maybe double check, but I assume that since this check is in the constructor, geometry built via buildGeometry will hit this path too and end up having its vertices mapped to a single part.

One thought: maybe we can default to having one part if none have been made yet, and that's where the data lives, and on the geometry itself we just have getter/setters that map to that first part? If we mark it as empty with a flag, then a method to add a part can check for that first and delete the old one if it's the default empty one?

Regardless, we maybe want to make parts a documented thing (so, maybe without the _ prefix on the name) and mark the direct access of vertices.faces/etc deprecated so that it's still there for now, but the expectation is that it's removed in 3.0?

thanks @davepagurek for the detailed thoughts here, really helpful

checked the buildGeometry path, you're right, it goes through the same Geometry constructor so it gets wrapped into one part too. works fine, tests pass, good to confirm

i like the first-part-holds-the-data idea. in the renderer follow up i just had the geometry be its own first part (parts = [this]) so there's only one copy, but happy to do the getter + empty-flag way if you prefer it

and agreed on making parts public, renamed it already, and i'll mark direct vertices/faces access deprecated so it keeps working for now but is set to go in 3.0