Composable Shaders with a similar architecture to ClojureScript's Gamma

[amethyst]

Composable Shaders with a similar architecture to ClojureScript's Gamma

[Rhuagh]

This should be doable after hal, using spir-v shader modules

[ebkalderon]

@codri Seems really neat! I'll have to play around with this framework a bit before I comment on it, though. Thanks for the find.

[ebkalderon]

@codri So far, I'm loving the ideas behind Gamma. Being able to compose shaders like this is rather nice, plus it could potentially be used as a layer of abstraction over GLSL, HLSL, etc. which is huge.

However, I do believe such a layer would probably be better utilized in the Amethyst toolchain rather than at run-time in the engine proper. Perhaps when amethyst build is called, it calls another hypothetical utility which translates shader code written in some flexible language like Scheme into one of the target platform's supported shading languages (e.g. SPIR-V/HLSL for Windows, SPIR-V/GLSL for Linux, and GLSL for other possibly older platforms).

Keep in mind, I'm just brainstorming ideas. It is too early to start building, but at least it provides some food for thought.

[Xaeroxe]

cc @omni-viral Does this issue look useful to you?

[zakarumych]

@Xaeroxe you can set it low priority improvement at leave open. We will need to improve our tools

[minecrawler]

I think, something like that is extremely useful, because it allows us to separate different implementations for certain effects. For example, I might decide to use lighting, however I might want to use a lighting/shadow variant which Amethyst does not support (e.g. Voxel Cone Tracing Illumination), so I could implement it and just replace the standard lighting/shadow shader like that - ideally sending the whole new module upstream to store like a library ;)

However, I think that shader modules should be selectable during runtime, too, because I might want to use better visual effects on a stronger computer, but reduce that to basic ones on weaker machines. Maybe it is possible to do so by using different entry points?

[torkleyy]

I think we can close this issue, it doesn't provide any valuable information and we'll get this for free soon.