So this last week’s been pretty hairy for me;  not yet sure what next week is going to be like.  But as a result, I really haven’t been very productive at all on home stuff;  all my attention has been on paying work.

While trying to get my head back into the development space this weekend, I’ve added support for game-side shaders to VectorStorm.  That is, individual games can now create their own GLSL shaders and use them with models rendered via VectorStorm.  In the screenshot above (edit:  to the right), you can see a prototype “Rez In” shader being applied to the usual MT2 tree model.

When running on hardware which doesn’t support shaders, rendering will go via the usual OpenGL fixed function pipeline, skipping the shaders.  Less pretty, but games will still run successfully.  (Individual games can test whether shaders are available, if they wish to take some other action in that situation)

Non-shader-supporting hardware is actually pretty rare, these days;  perhaps low-end computers from four or five years ago which are using integrated graphics might still not support shaders?  But all modern integrated graphics chipsets seem to support shaders these days..  These days, there are even a lot of phones that support shaders;  so it’s not nearly the problem that it used to be.

Anyhow, I’m going to try to get back to the new combat system stuff later tonight and over the coming week.  Most of the really hard system work is done on it now;  now it’s just the drudge work of updating the GUI and the PC/Monster AI to use it.