Artists Refactor

[mehulsinha73]

Main goals

The issue details a proposal to refactor/add to the current implementation of the Artists class. The main goals for the refactor are as follows:

• Extend the artist class to contain functions for handling of labels and other settings
• Define moving vs static artist behavior
• Fix opacity/transparency rendering - Resolve transparency issues through draw call preprocessing and z-order-based compositing
• Optimize render manager - minimize unnecessary redraws and reduce redundant draw calls

Expected Outcomes

The expected outcomes from this are as follows:

• Labels (or any other data field) can be attached to an agent. This attached value will move along with the agent and its visibility can be toggled on/off (either manually or zooming in / hovering on an agent).
• Artists with transparency are rendered in the correct order
• Unnecessary redraws are minimized and redundant draw calls are reduced, improving overall rendering performance
• Backward compatibility with existing artist APIs is maintained. External API changes minimized

Closes / Related Issues

• Closes Transparent draws do not work #71
• Closes Clean-up Graph Refactor #55 (to be confirmed)
• Related Optimized Graph Caching #43 (backend scope)