I saw this part from the battlefield3 presentation (http://dice.se/wp-content/uploads/GDC11_DX11inBF3_Public.pdf) on page 30 where they show how they transfer transformations of each instance to the shader using a single big buffer and a const buffer with indices to index this buffer at the right position using the SV_InstanceID semantic. Can someone tell me what exactly this buffer is ?
This part here:
Buffer<float4> instanceVectorBuffer : register(t0);
I'm not too familiar with buffers in directx11 beyond constant buffers...
Isn't register(t0) for texture slots ? Also they seem to use 3x4 floats for their transformations, so does that mean they construct their transformation matrix inside the shader using translation, rotation and scale vectors ?
And last how would I set such a buffer in the DX11 API ?