Shaders ?

Can anyone provide a simple definition of "shaders" ?

I don't mean, a manual description... I mean just
say it with your words.

And may be, at the same time you could explain me this:
For me, shaders are just a way of blending a texture
in a polygon according to a certain mathematical equation.
So for me, Blitz3d does have shaders, and multiply x2, or
dot 3 blending, or additive blend, ARE shaders ... so
my question could be, if we would have a way of
entering custom "blending equations" inside b3d, could
this be called as shaders?

I'm probably wrong about most of I have said, so please
explain it easily :)

Technically, yes, that could be called shaders.

My definition of shaders is pretty general, to me they're a system which allows me to control the textures, UV coordinates, and vertex positions through a high level scripting language or definitions file (I call mine materials).

For example, I could add this line to a shader of my own


And the equation would be, pretty much, x = x + |sin(time * 0.25)*W . The position of the vertex would be reverted back to its original position before updating it to its new position so that nothing horrendous occurs.

Shaders are programs(algorythms) that run on vertex and pixel buffers dirrectly in the GPU memory. They are capable of running extremely fast because they are both directly on the vid card(which means there's no need to resend data over the AGP), and the GPU can access everything very quickly off that memory.

[edit]What you're talking about is the old style "shader". The kind where it's simply opperations running on a texture.

any one going to write a DLL for this?
the dll would be an upgrade to Blitz id say

writepixle to a buffer is about the slowest way to do things that Uneal 1 was already able to do in DX 7

AFAIK, you can't write a DLL just for shaders. You'd have to write an entire DX9 engine in order to have access to them. Drago posted recently that his company were going to be doing just that sometime in the next couple of months, IIRC.

Well see what pops up.

Oh man.. dx 9 in blitz?? id like to see how this would work! not im interested. i like directx 7 (*laugh*)

See blitz showcase, vivid demo 2 uses pixel shaders, in blitz. (A new 3d engine) it may interest you.

Thanks to all :)

VividGL seems like it will be something pretty good ill keep an eye on it.

btw Spacedman can't you do an effort to fix your website, having the list of your file in place of your main page is quite anoying and unprofessional.

The site isn't uploaded yet. That's the first version still I posted a month or so back.

I know it's not a perfect situration, but i'm just one man trying to do the work of twenty men atm. It has to show somewhere.

Btw, if you're the same Nikko that e-mailed me, can you re-send? I re-installed windows couple days back and lost my old unaswered mail.