Shaders (HLSL)

us · Post by us » Wed Jan 07, 2004 9:16 pm

Is irrlicht support HLSL.

keless · Post by **keless** » Wed Jan 07, 2004 10:51 pm

niko · Post by **niko** » Thu Jan 08, 2004 6:41 am

This question is asked that much, I really should add support for this. Or better: Adding a new item into the FAQ.

Noldo · Post by **Noldo** » Thu Jan 08, 2004 9:15 am

Is there a specific reason for the lack of shader support, or is it just one of those "I'll get to it after I have solved these other problems first" ?

niko · Post by **niko** » Thu Jan 08, 2004 9:39 am

First, the engine has a very high level application progamming interface, so normally the irrlicht engine user should not get in touch with shader programming. That's the way it currently works: with Irrlicht, you cannot influence how and what renderstates are set. You simply select the material type, and the engine does everything else for you.

But for sure, lots of programmers want to do this, and to be able to create more cool materials and use other features of modern gfx adapters, I would be nice to be able to select and use pixel and vertex shaders. For this, I'll first have to design an easy-to-use and general interface, that's the most diffucult part.

Until now, there was no big need of vertex and pixel shaders. People who needed them for cooler material types simply added a material constant, and implemented the rendering into the video driver.

So, yes: The answer is I want to implement other things first, which I consider more important.