Surely with the programmers capabilities of gdevelop it wouldn’t be too much
for them to add a nodal gui for shaders with pre-built shader nodes and so on and then allow the user to get creative…
Anyone against that makes no sense to me; apart from a nodal approach not being good enough and or a better approach …
Even a text-based built-in “Shader-Extension” editor to make shaders in the engine with GLSL would be great (Unless we already Can), since we are encouraged to do so with behaviours and extensions via event code for logic.
I think for those of us who can code in GLSL, doing so in the editor without having to submit PR’s to benefit all, we could then test in the editor, and export out, I think this would be great as then we can submit a PR if it’s worth it to the whole ecosystem.
Example - Like how Godot has their shader-code tab to save a shader file in the engine and use after.
There’s plenty of reasons, the lack of a shadergraph is by far GDevelop’s biggest weakness as a game engine in my opinion.
If you’re making any commercial game, chances are you’ll want to create an effect, a specific look, or otherwise do something through shaders that isn’t feasibly achieved through traditional logic.
Not to mention performance gains from off-loading simple things to the GPU, anything from like a car wheel spinning and grass blowing in the wind to destruction and character customisation.
Currently in GDevelop I’m faking a lot of effects I’d rather run through a shader with code due to the sheer complexity of hooking into the Pixi renderer and injecting GLSL to Sprites (not to mention this isn’t a part of the engine, and instead a workaround).
As you can imagine this is not good for performance, but it’s important to achieve the visual look I’m after.
There’s other effects that I really want to implement, but I can’t because the engine doesn’t really support shaders.
The upside of a shadergraph (of any form) is pretty big. Ideally I’d like to see something more visual script based as it’s infinitely easier than writing HLSL/GLSL/whatever.
Most modern engines make creating shaders pretty easy, yeah you still have to write the logic for it. If you can’t you might find someone has created and shared the shader you need before.
Right now in GDevelop, you’re unlikely to have this experience because the engine doesn’t really support a way for creating, exporting and importing shaders.
If your experience is different than that then I am sorry but I’ll have to be a little crass; you’ll be hard pressed to find many serious commercial titles developed entirely without the use of shaders, and limiting that to a couple dozen pre-made effects isn’t a great solution. It’s nice to have, but the flexibility should be there for those who want it, as well as it opens up a lot of learning opportunities for the end users of this engine.
The idea that you’ll need a shader “no one has ever invented” appears to fundamentally misunderstand what shaders in games are.