Shaders

i'm not sure how well this is defined by everyone and there may well be more than one definition, so i'll explain what i mean first. i play with wolfenstein ET's editor, gtkradiant a bit now and then and it uses 'shaders'. in that context, a shader is an effect that is applied to and saved with an image. so, one might have a 'glass' shader that makes your glass image breakable within the game. or one might have a 'caulk' shader, which makes the image invisible within the game. it's still there, just invisible. so, that's what shaders do within the context of wolf ET.

but it occurred to me that a sort of shader could be used in FF also. we dont have breakable glass and invisible images which are still there, but we do have lighting and we do have masking of a sort and i'm sure there are other things that could be made shaders also. a shader in the context of FF would be sort of like a pre-set effect, like a particular type of lighting. add the shader in your procedure and it would automatically give that type of lighting. add another and it would give a particular masking effect or clipping effect.

these could be fixed, unalterable effects with a very large library of these or, they could have controls included within them that allowed for variances, thus needing a smaller library. you could possibly even allow scripting within these.

i could see these being used with the editor as part of the procedure or within the main gui as after effects.

now, it's quite possible that everything i've mentioned here has been requested in another form. i just dont remember seeing it in the form i'm suggesting, so i thought i'd post it for discussion. i know scripting has been mentioned before and i know that increasing the hdri manipulation has been discussed and point lighting and a number of other similar ideas. so, feel free to shoot holes in what i'm saying here.

i could also see this as an add-on pack to FF. buy the main program and then buy the add-on pack with shaders, official hdri environments (.exr's) and so on.

anyway, that's the basic idea. talk amongst yourselves