Cloning and Sharing

Cloning Parameters

Cloning has the following restrictions.

• Clones inherit the original effect's pool. See the Sharing Parameters section.
• Clones inherit the original effect's techniques, passes, parameters, and annotations (including all annotations added with ID3DXEffect).
• Clones inherit the original effect's dynamically added annotations.
• Cloning onto a new device will fail if the original effect's pool was not NULL and the original effect contained a shared device-dependent parameter (such as a texture or shader).

Sharing Parameters

A pool is a buffer that shares effect parameters between different effects. To add parameters to a pool, specify a shared usage when the effect is created.

A pool has the following restrictions.

• A parameter is added to the pool the first time an effect containing that (shared) parameter is added to the pool.
• A pool gets initial values from the first shared parameter; parameters shared subsequently get their values from the pool.
• A parameter is deleted from the pool when all effect references to the shared parameter are released.
• All effects in the pool that contain the same (shared) device-dependent parameter must have the same device.

NULL can be used to specify no pool, in which case no parameters are shared. This is almost equivalent to specifying a unique pool just for this effect. The single difference is that when the effect is cloned, the clone will not share its shared parameters with the original.