It’s alive!
So I’ve been working on Nody, trying to get it to be as flexible and as intuitive as possible. Thus far, I can modify shaders (which in turn actually rewrites the shader code) and have them presented to me in real-time, which is pretty neat. What I wanted to do when that worked was to be able to set variables such as textures, directly from Nody, so that one can preview how a shader would look on a specific model with a specific set of variables. That’s what got me into the texture compression part (see last post).
Nody will not serve as a texturing tool, seeing as it’s purpose is to create shaders, and that’s it. The reason for this is because Nody is supposed to work on a per-shader level. Nebula uses 3 different levels, resource, template and instance. The first, resources, is the most general of these three, it can be a mesh, a shader, a texture, a sound file, or any other type of resource one might need. The second level describes for example a model, which is a collection of resources, and resource states, such as shader variables, texture attachments, sound attachments, animations, skeletons etc. The third level is instance, which is what is you actually use in your game. Nody is a level 1 tool, meaning its purpose is to handle a resource, in this case a shader. A colleague of mine is currently working on a level 2 tool which will be a part of the level editor. This tool is called the material editor, and it allows a user to switch materials (not the shaders within the material), textures, variables etc. It’s basically meant to change the model-file, which is used as a template for all instances. On the instance level, very little is changed in resource-manners. One might want to change a certain variable, but that is pretty much as far as you go. One might want to be able to have variations without really changing the model file, and that is fine, as long as one keeps track of the variable name and sets it correctly.
When picking textures in Nody, Nody will present your working directory, where you have your image files in raw format. Whenever a texture is picked, Nody will look for the presence of an exported version, and if it doesn’t exist, calls the texture batcher to export it.
Although, one might want to be able test out their shader to every extent before deciding it’s exactly what they want, and that means variables and textures has to be testable online. With online I mean without having to restart either application. I haven’t really had the time to make a video yet, but I’m working on getting one out, so you can see how powerful this tool is. It’s really cool too
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