Ultra Engine Shader System

[klepto2]

I have 2 ideas for making the Shader and postprocess pipeline a bit more flexible and to keep the innerarchitecture mostly untouched:

Postprocessing:

1. Add a method (preferable static, to let later plugins or  where you can assign a named Texture, something like:
   1. PostEffect::RegisterTexture("MyCustomTex");
   2. PostEffect::SetTexture("MyCustomTex", mytexture);
   3. in the json file you can now access them like depth, etc. Just the binding code might be a bit adjusted on your end.

Generel shaders:

• The current shader system is super fast because you more or less make everything available to every shader. With this in mind, i thought about something like the precompiler for components, but on the fly.
• with libs like shaderc or glslang it is possible to compile shaders to SPIR-V on the fly in the code.
  • Add something like Shader::AddBufferData("BufferName", "Layout",size, &object);
  • With this we could modify e.G.: UniformBlocks.glsl and add the new buffer data to the pipeline
  • On start when the first shader is about to be loaded the UniformBlocks.glsl is validated against the possible current one.
    • If the validation is succesfull, just use the latest shaders and go on
    • if the UniformBlocks.glsl is different from the new generated one: rebuild all shaders like you already do with the batch file.
• This would make the system a bit more flexible for additions, but will also maintain the speed you get from less binding switches.

 

[Josh]

Moved here so I don't lose track of this...