Best practises for writing shaders

Postie · 2012-12-06T17:01:39

Hey guys, So I'm a few years into my part-time game project and have been learning HLSL and DirectX as I go. I'm pretty confident in my ability to write HLSL shaders to do pretty much everything I need currently but have a question about the general architecture of shaders and how they should fit together. For example, I have a terrain shader that handles some funky texture, tile-based lighting stuff and shadow mapping as well as some special effects, like highlighting an individual tile or drawing some special construction lines. I also have an entity shader that I use for all the objects in my game and can also do Blinn-Phong shading. I also have many other specific use shaders, such as a water shader, a fire shader.. etc etc... I've realised that I now want to add the shadow mapping code to the entity shader, as I originally only implemented it in the terrain shader. But then it occurred to me that I'll probably want that feature in some of the other shaders down the track. So my first question is, should I be implementing a given feature (eg shadow mapping) multiple times for every shader that needs it, or should I be trying to create a "it-does-everything" shader? And as a follow up, could I be writing my shaders to be more modular? I'm currently not using the ability to have multiple techniques or passes as I don't follow how they should be used.

Graphics and GPU Programming Programming

Started by Postie December 05, 2012 12:22 AM

9 comments, last by cephalo 11 years, 4 months ago

cephalo

739

December 06, 2012 05:01 PM

Are we talking about dx9 shaders or dx11? I'm in the process of learning dx11 and porting stuff over, and I get the impression that 'best practice' has changed drastically in the jump. Most of the examples I've seen use separate files for pixel shaders and vertex shaders, and the effect framework seems to be deprecated.

Best practises for writing shaders

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Best practises for writing shaders

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