The wiki says about "Irrlicht Shader Files": "Would be nice if we could add some Shader file format for Irrlicht."... "There are several proposals on the forum already."
I have been looking in the forum and I haven't found those threads Does anybody know where are those proposals?
By the way, It seems that the next Irrlicht version will have full support for COLLADA 1.4 has been added. Where is the full list of new features in Irrlicht 1.5? That one is not listed.
How would you go about making up a new shader format? Wouldn't that be a huge amount of work as you'd have to write the whole language, compilers etc...
Or do you mean more like a file format which sort of configures irrlicht's pipeline... rather than being an actual shader program...?
The wiki says "Basically, a XML file with material descriptions for the different Video Driver implementations. "
What I thought is having some kind of irrlicht shader file with the description of the diferent shaders available for an material/effect. That configuration file would specify if there are shader(s) for HLSL, GLSL or Cg.
As well as the minimun vertex/pixel shader version required to run in hardware the shader. The diferent available profiles for the Cg shader. (or even CUDA if somebody do not want to use shaders but using the GPU for somekind of real time high perfomance physics simulation). Even it could be used to decide using the "Software renderer" when there is only a shader whose minimum required shader version is 3 and our card only supports version 2, for example.
As the wiki says "There are several proposals on the forum already." and I have been searching and searching and I haven't found anything and I would want to know if somebody knows where they are. So I could read the current proposals to see the big picture.
I think than new shader format file isn't good idea, only material script file will be good (similar to ogre *.material files) I'm working to add material script file into my IrrCg project.
First of all, I would want to say that I love iirCg. Thanks for creating it.
The problem I wanted to address is as follows:
I'm working on a personal project. I want to have Phong shading.
I want it to be executable even with ancient graphic cards. So I have a fast phong shader for DirectX for version 1.x shaders. But also a set of newer shaders for relatively new cards.
What is the right way to issue my requirements? Wouldn't it be having some kind of script file with the different supported profiles (something similat to Cg profiles)?
I would love to see your material script files when available.
Yeah I agree, the only file that would really be beneficial is a *.material like file. And not complaining, but also a better Irrlicht mesh format, so that everything is more unified when it comes to the pipeline.
Does anybody know where are those proposals? 
