Advanced HLSL II: Shader compound parameters

A very short post in the sequel of my previous post "Advanced HLSL using closures and function pointers", there is again a little neat trick by using the "class" keyword in HLSL: It is possible to use a class to regroup a set of parameters (shader resources as well as constant buffers) and their associate methods, into what is called a compound parameter. This feature of the language is absolutely not documented, I discovered the name "compound parameter" while trying to hack this technique, as the HLSL compiler was complaining about a restriction about this "compound parameter". So at least, It seems to be implemented up to the point that it is quite usable. Let's see how we can use this...

Advanced HLSL using closures and function pointers

Shader languages like HLSL, Cg or GLSL are nowadays driving the most powerful processors in the world, but if you are developing with them, you may have been already a little bit frustrated by one of their expressiveness limitations: the common problem of abstraction and code reuse. In order to overcome this problem, solutions so far were mostly using a glue combination of #define/#include preprocessors directives in order to generate combinations of code, permutation of shaders, so called UberShaders. Recently, this problem has been addressed, for HLSL (new in Direct3D11), by providing the concept of Dynamic Linking, and for GLSL, the concept of SubRoutines, For Direct3D11, the new mechanism has been only available for Shader Model 5.0, meaning that even if this could greatly simplified the problem of abstraction, It is unfortunately only available for Direct3D11 class graphics card, which is of course a huge limitation...

But, here is the good news: While the classic usage of dynamic linking is not really possible from earlier version (like SM4.0 or SM3.0), I have found an interesting hack to bring some kind of closures and functions pointers to HLSL(!). This solution doesn't involve any kind of preprocessing directive and is able to work with SM3.0 and SM4.0, so It might be interesting for folks like me that like to abstract and reuse the code as often as possible! But let's see how It can be achieved...

NShader 1.1, hlsl, glsl, cg syntax coloring for Visual Studio 2008 & 2010

I have recently released NShader 1.1 which adds support for Visual Studio 2010 as well as bugfixes for hlsl/glsl syntax highlighting.

While this plugin is quite cool to add a basic syntax highlighting for shader languages, It lacks intellisense/completion/error markers to improve the editor experience. I didn't have time to add such a functionality in this release as... I don't really have too much time dedicated to this project... and well, I have so much to learn from effectively practicing a lot more shader languages that I'm fine with this basic syntax highlighting! ;) Is it a huge task to add intellisense? It depends, but concretely, I need to implement for each shading language a full grammar/lexer parser in order to provide a reliable intellisense. Of course, a very basic intellisense would be feasible without this, but I would rather not to use an annoying/unreliable intellisense popup.

Building .fx hlsl files with a Custom Build Rule under Visual Studio 2008

It's sometimes convenient to be able to compile directly a .fx file under a VS C++ project. NShader provides a nice way to highlight your code, but it's not able (yet, not sure I will update it up to this feature) to compile anything or to display syntax errors.

Hopefully, there is a simple workaround, avoiding to develop your own custom building task : using a custom build rule. Unfortunately, I was able to find one a while ago on Internet, but I lost it, and if I remember, it was lacking some features (like showing all available profiles)... So I decided yesterday to implement my own building rules files, leveraging on the existing .asm rules files that is shipped with Visual Studio, and It was surprisingly easy to write it.

To add this custom building rules to VS, follow these instructions: