Shader Development/Maintaining

[beni]

I was thinking these days about shaders and Orxonox. While Ogre supports a lot of shader and there are some Ogre examples that show the use of shaders, we hardly use shaders at all in Orxonox.
From the beginning we wanted to support a wide variety of systems and thus we wanted to have low requirements for hardware, but I think it is also important to support high end systems that do have strong graphic cards and support a lot of shaders.
As for now we did have some students that were developing shaders, but we do not have a maintainer. We also never discuss the use of shaders and thus our graphics are just less beautiful than they could be.

I wanted to discuss, what kind of shaders we could set up, if we need something in the framework to better support shaders and who could maintain them. We should also offer shader development in the PPS as long as there is somebody among the assistants that has a general understanding of them.

[x3n]

well we do have vertex-shader support, for example the screen is distorted with a radial blur if you press the boost button, but it's deactivated per default on linux. You can also place 'global shaders' which affect all players in the game in a map. We currently don't have the possibility to trigger a generic shader (defined in xml) only on one client due to the lack of a good camera management system. also we don't support pixel shaders currently.

[beni]

So if I understand this correctly, there is still stuff to do until shaders are properly supported. I know of course of the shaders we use now, but could somebody change it or write a new one for another effect? I know some of us experimented with some shaders, but there is nobody that actually maintains the shaders and adjusts them to the current graphics.

[x3n]

but could somebody change it or write a new one for another effect?

sure, why not? all shaders are in the data repository. consult the ogre wiki for more documentation.

and i don't feel like "maintaining" shaders and "adjusting them to the current graphics" (what do you mean by that anyway?) as long as we still have countless development blocking and game breaking issues in the framework.

[greenman]

i would say if we find someone (not already otherwise involved in development) it would be nice to have additional shaders. i think this one doesn't really have to know a lot about orxonox to do that, so it could also be someone else than one of the core/main developpers.

but for the moment i don't know anyone fitting the above criteria

[x3n]

ogre provides quite a few basic shaders and you can adjust them to your needs of course. the only thing i currently miss is a "glow" shader, but this is also related to materials, because we have to define which materials glow and which don't. i think it's easy to do after we figured out how to use material properties in shaders, because it boils down to a blured overlay and that's already present in ogre/our repository.

[lieni]

ogre && shader == fail