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Shaders and materials

· 2 min read
Dragos
Balaur

A shader language with imports, and materials that relink the moment the shader is saved.

What landed​

  • Shaders. WESL — WGSL plus imports, @if variants and dead-code elimination — linked to WGSL at run time. A 2D shader imports package::sprite; a 3D one imports package::mesh and calls shade(in) for the scene's lights.
  • Materials. A material asset names a shader and its [params], read off the linked shader rather than declared twice. sprite, shape2d, shape3d and mesh take one; a node without one draws with the built-in material.
  • Relink on save. Save the shader and every material naming it relinks and every node drawing with it is rebuilt. One that will not link is reported with the line the author wrote, and the node keeps the built-in material meanwhile.
  • Channels. render::set_channel("uv") draws the scene's UVs instead of its colour; normals, depth and albedo are the others.
# materials/glow.toml
type = "material"
shader = "shaders/glow.wesl"

[params]
speed = 2.0
rings = 5.0
tint = "#ffb347"

Rendering observes the simulation and feeds nothing back, so a shader is outside the digest and time() is render time, not the tick. A function marked @const still runs on the CPU in headless tests.

examples/shaders is a glow material on a sprite beside a plain one, and it runs in the browser. Shaders and materials in the manual.