The OP didn't ask about permutations at all.. he never mentioned them... he asked 'How should shader support be designed in the engine so it is actually easy to use while programming the game?' which says nothing about permutations at all.

Isn't this a touch pedantic? Shader permutations/integration/how they're handled in an engine, it's roughly the same subject matter.

Not necessarily. Permutations were first mentioned in my own post, but an alternative was also provided called “stitching”.

But when someone asks about how to handle shaders it is an open-ended question, so using the fact that he never mentioned 50% of the options (since these really are the only 2 options) is a tad on the pedantic side (yes, strictly accurate, but you can’t be pedantic without being strictly accurate), specifically because the original question was open-ended. You could say that he didn’t mention shrunken mice and rocket boosters just because it satisfies some pedantic quality. “He never mentioned butlers and jet-packs.” It is just unfair to mention all the things the original poster did not mention when trying to prove your point, simply because even if it is the correct answer he simply never knew to mention it, and that is the whole basis for that rebuttal.

However, yes, he didn’t mention it. I did.

So you are both wrong.

And both right.

The best thing to do now is to let this thread fall into the obscurities of future Googler’s since the most important and relevant posts were fairly close to the start of the thread.

Any more and the next thing we know is, “Hello, I am from 3194 and I love to necromance topics when I have an opinion.”

L. Spiro