ShadersForGames To Offer Next-Gen Shaders To Game Developers

[Sybixsus]

Shaders For Games launched today, offering next-gen shaders for game developers, engine developers and language developers to use in their own products. Shaders For Games ( http://www.shadersforgames.com ) will offer all of the most desirable and most popular next-gen shader effects including Normal Mapping, Parallax Mapping, Water, Glass, Holographic Reflections and many more.

Shaders For Games is on a mission to bring shaders to game developers of all levels of experience and budgets. In the past, only the multi-million dollar game development studios were able to make extensive use of shaders in their games and engines. Now everyone from the bedroom coder right up to the large studios will be able to bring next-gen shader technology into their games with a minimum of effort and expense. Budget Licenses will be available for independent developers at vastly reduced rates, and Development Licenses will be made available for game engine developers who wish to integrate the shaders into their tools for all of their users to take advantage of.

The first three shader packs are already available from the Shaders For Games website. Pack 1 contains a selection of the most popular shader effects, enough to give any game developer a great shader base on which to build their graphics pipeline. Shaders in this pack include terrain splatting, lightmapping, normal mapping, metals, plastics, water, glass, holographs, reflections and more. Pack 2 is a specialized pack focusing on all types of bumpy shaders. This pack includes normal mapping, parallax or offset bump mapping, and a new shader technique known as Detail Bump Mapping, which allows two different normal maps to be overlaid on each other to create an incredibly detailed raised surface, all without creating any additional geometry so it remains lightning fast to render. Pack 3 is another specialized pack, this one focusing on water. The pack includes a set of shaders capable of rendering breathtaking water in various Shader Models, and with many customizations options to tweak the effect as desired. All three packs are currently available in the industry standard FX ( HLSL Effect ) format, with plans for CG and GLSL versions to follow shortly.

As well as providing extensive guides on integrating the shaders into a game pipeline, and the specifics of using the shaders with various game engines and programming languages, Shaders For Games will also be working with other developers to bring new packs, customized to the needs of particular game engines, including documentation and samples for use with those engines.

Shaders For Games will also be offering a custom shader service, where developers will be able to get their hands on exclusive shaders designed specifically for their needs.

Shader Pack 1 Screenshot : http://www.shadersforgames.com/gallery/Scene3.jpg
Shader Pack 1 Demo : http://www.shadersforgames.com/demos/Pack1Sample.exe
Shader Pack 2 Screenshot : http://www.shadersforgames.com/gallery/Scene2.jpg
Shader Pack 2 Demo : http://www.shadersforgames.com/demos/Pack2Sample.exe
Shader Pack 3 Screenshot : http://www.shadersforgames.com/gallery/Water1.jpg

Currently each pack is available to Indies at just $49.95, a full 80% off the price of a Professional License, and with all the same rights. Any individuals or companies with a turnover below $250,000 per year qualify as Indies, so we make sure that Indies don't have to jump through hoops.

[Applewood]

How do these integrate into current engines wrt lighting and shadow calculations ?

[Sybixsus]

Hi Paul, thanks for the question. I don't know how familiar ( or not ) you are with shaders, so I'll apologize in advance if I come off as patronising or if I don't go into enough technical details. It can be hard to gauge a response when you don't know where the questioner is at, so I'll try to find a middle ground.

All the currently available packs are FX shaders, which means they contain both pixel ( fragment ) and vertex shaders in one. Therefore it follows that applying any FX shader completely replaces anything else you have going in the fixed function pipeline, and also you cannot apply two shaders to the same object ( at least not without combining them. )

With regard to lighting, the shaders that need lighting do the lighting calculations themselves. For example, normal mapping, parallax mapping, those are all about the lighting, so it follows that the lighting calculations are done as part of those shaders. The lights are there, and have semantics set to them, though the semantics used with vary between engines, of course, so you can either match semantics to what your engine uses ( if any ) and the lights are properly accounted for. Normal mapping, parallax mapping, etc have multiple versions supporting between 1 and 4 lights, color and position are used, and there are also options with and without attenuation so you can make those directional ( no attenuation ) lights or point ( with attenuation ) light sources.

With some of the shaders, lighting isn't really appropriate. For example a flat mirror is going to reflect what it reflects, if it's reflecting something light, it will be lit, if it's reflecting something dark, it won't. The thermal vision shader, for another example, no lighting is appropriate on here, so no lighting is done.

With regard to shadows, it would depend on the nature of the shadowing techniques being used, and whether you wanted the objects with shaders applied to cast or receive. Generally speaking, for stencil techniques, you're not going to have any problems, and for dynamic shadowmapping, you would simply have to combine your shadowmapping shader with our shader, which is what you already have to do with shadowmapping anyway.

The license permits whatever modifications you need to make, so if you need to cut it up and merge it with your shadowmapping shader, go right ahead.

[Applewood]

ok, thanks. Sounds like a good solution, though one that isn't compatible with our engine. I was just curious how you were handling it.

Not patronising at all btw, though I have been head of rendering/avanced tech for about 10 years at work :)

[Sybixsus]

Ok, glad I managed to avoid patronising or offending. You're right, it's always difficult to integrate shaders with an existing engine, particularly a custom in-house engine. We have generic solutions for TrueVision3D ( which is one of the very best for shader integration ) and Deep Creator ( which is also very good here. ) We have documentation to assist with integration with DarkBasic Pro and Irrlicht, and we're hoping to add more.

3D GameStudio and Torque are one I'd personally really like to support properly, and we're looking at how best to do that now. Depending on how much work is involved, we may end up having engine-ready packs available separately so that little or no conversion is necessary, but that will depend on the amount of interest in the respective engines. Both 3DGS and Torque communities have shown considerable interest, so if we possibly can, I'd definitely like to get some Torque-ready and 3DGS-ready packs available.

Obviously that sort of thing wouldn't be practical at $50 a pop for a custom in-house engine, although it is possible that some of the new packs we make might end up being more suitable for in-house engines when they are made into Torque-ready or 3DGS-ready packs. But we're really focusing on the widely-used indie-friendly packages and anything else is just a bonus. We're not really expecting major interest from larger developers simply because they'll probably be rolling their own.