Shader Definition

Shaders in Vulkan can be a bit complex, so we have developed the foundational tools to aid in the development and usage of shaders. In your content folder there is a folder named "shaders", this folder should contain a folder named "definitions". Inside of this folder is where you create a simple definition file for your shader.

Setting up a new shader definition

A shader definition contains all of the information about the shaders that will be combined to create a shader pipeline. To start, you will need to create a new shader definition .json file. This file should just contain one object named "Vulkan" and inside of it, fill out the shaders that make up the pipeline.

So for example, the basic shader definition would be created as:

{
    "Vulkan": {
        "Vert": "shaders/spv/basic.vert.spv",
        "Frag": "shaders/spv/basic.frag.spv",
        "Geom": "",
        "Tesc": "",
        "Tese": "",
    }
}

This tells the system what shaders you will need for this pipeline. With just the description of which shaders to use, you are ready to generate the rest of the information directly from your supplied shaders.

Generate shader definition

To generate the shader definitions, you can run the go generator tool found in

src/generators/shader_definition/main.go

If you are in visual studio, you can run this by selecting the "Shader Definition Generator" launch setting and running it. This will go through all of the definition files within content/shaders/definitions and update the .json files to contain all the information needed about the shader. With this, the engine will know how to load up your shader and setup the pipeline layout for your shader. It will also setup any named buffer objects so that you can update the data within them in your code easily by using their name.