dboone / shader-baker Goto Github PK

Currently, each validation pass for shaders asks OpenGL to create a brand new shader object for validation, and deletes it after validation has completed. This approach has a couple of issues:

• For a GLSL program validation feature, any shaders attached to a program will have to be created and compiled again. If the same shader is attached to multiple programs, it will have to be created and compiled for each of these programs.
• For a GLSL program preview feature, the same problem occurs as for whole program validation. Shaders have to be recreated and recompiled.

On-the-fly recompilation is a simple and nicely decoupled design, but is incredibly wasteful. A more efficient solution would be to cache OpenGL shader objects that have already been validated, so that they can be reused immediately when validating programs, and when setting up a program for rendering.

Establishing a caching pattern will also be useful for future features, such as program validation, loading program inputs into buffer objects, etc.

The application should generate unique names for shaders and programs, and require that the name be unique when the user renames them. This will help disambiguate parts of the GUI. For example, the shader error list displays the shader name along with the error message. If two shaders have the same name, it is impossible for the user to tell which one is in error without inspecting the shader source code directly.

This will also ease the addition of a serialized project format. It is likely that shaders will be stored in separate files (rather than embedded in a monolithic project file), and in this case the shader name can also be used as its file name.