Proper way to encapsulate a Shader into different modules
- by y7haar
I am planning to build a Shader system which can be accessed through different components/modules in C++. Each component has its own functionality like transform-relevated stuff (handle the MVP matrix, ...), texture handler, light calculation, etc...
So here's an example:
I would like to display an object which has a texture and a toon shading material applied and it should be moveable.
So I could write ONE shading program that handles all 3 functionalities and they are accessed through 3 different components (texture-handler, toon-shading, transform).
This means I have to take care of feeding a GLSL shader with different uniforms/attributes. This implies to know all necessary uniform locations and attribute locations, that the GLSL shader owns. And it would also necessary to provide different algorithms to calculate the value for each input variable. Similar functions would be grouped together in one component.
A possible way would be, to wrap all shaders in a own definition file written in JSON/XML and parse that file in C++ to get all input members and create and compile the resulting GLSL. But maybe there is another way that is not so complex?
So I'm searching for a way to build a system like that, but I'm not sure yet which is the best approach.
