Casually Hardcore devlog

The trouble with real-time shaders - part II

February 3rd, 2008

Lack of standards.

You have the following shading languages:

1. Cg/HLSL
2. GLSL
3. MetaSL
4. Sh

But those are NOT useful on their own - you need a shader wrapper to describe passes + render settings which adds to the complexity to using shaders. Shaders need certain parameters passed from the graphics engine like the model-view-projection matrix and custom values (shininess, diffuse colour, specular colour, etc.)

1. CgFX
2. HLSL FX
3. COLLADA FX
4. OGRE .materials
5. Unreal/Source materials
6. etc.

It’s getting ridiculous. In the offline world it was RenderMan SL and RIB files… you had some random spin offs like VEX + Houdini and Mental Ray, but nothing as important as RenderMan.

Entry Filed under: Game Development