Re: [AD] More default shaders

[Nick Trout <chinbillybilbo@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I think it sounds like a good idea. In a sense it isn't that different from having draw ellipse and pie slice in the primitives add-on. They aren't essential, but they are useful. These effects might save you time writing a game, or quickly mocking an idea up. You might even try a few of these first, which then give you ideas to write your own shader.

Perhaps simple materials could also be supporte. Effects might be useful for tinting etc, but materials would be nice for making things shiny, having glow, etc.

If the goal is to simplify shaders, perhaps, as well as stock effects, you might be able to chain them together, or have some sort of effect script, to allow people to author their own. This perhaps uses more plain English syntax than shader shader syntax. It would have to be quite basic or it may get complicated very quickly. Or perhaps a simple material language would be easier, like CSS.

Continuing the theme, you might even have stock sound effects or wave generators.

On 23 February 2013 04:45, Trent Gamblin <nooskewl@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

If the shader addon gets moved into the core, something like this would still belong in an addon. Undecided on whether I even like it in an OFFICIAL addon but I wouldn't lose sleep over it.

Trent

On 2013-02-22, at 7:02 PM, SiegeLord <slabode@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I think the shaders are a very cool concept but are hard for newbies to
> start with. I think the shader addon should provide a whole slew of
> default shaders for nice effects with an easy API that doesn't leak the
> implementation details (like the current al_get_glsl_*_shader do).
> Something that would recapitulate the effects you could get in A4 using
> the blenders (see
> http://alleg.sourceforge.net/stabledocs/en/alleg020.html for a list),
> but possibly add a number of other useful ones, like blurring or glass.
>
> One simple API idea would be to just do this:
>
> ALLEGRO_SHADER* al_create_default_shader();
> ALLEGRO_SHADER* al_create_light_shader();
> //etc
>
> After being created, the user would interact with the shader the usual
> way (the various variables, such as colors, will be set using the
> uniform setting syntax we already have).
>
> It might be interesting to simplify that even further and mimic the A4
> API more accurately (ignore the names, no thought was put into them):
>
> ALLEGRO_EFFECT_STATE* al_create_effect_state();
>
> al_use_default_effect(ALLEGRO_EFFECT_STATE* state);
> al_use_light_effect(ALLEGRO_EFFECT_STATE* state, ALLEGRO_COLOR light);
>
> Obviously this is inflexible, but it is exactly designed for ease of
> use by beginners. The old API is unaffected by this proposed change
> (even the al_get_default_glsl_*_shader have their use, just not this
> use).
>
> -SL
>
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