Hi!

I've always had some uncommon shader effects in my old games, mostly because I improvised an effect out of a shader that did not work correctly and also because I didn't know what I was doing.

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Exhibit C

So you have a general idea.
(This is old stuff from around 2011 so I hope that filehoster will load the pics for you.)

The point is, all of these effects have worked in old FPSCreator because I either misused them or had the wrong maps. ...or they wheren't fully fit to work in FPSC...but they still displayed something. However in Game Guru, all I ever get is a pitch black model. Since I have zero clue about shaders other than adjusting tweakable values I'd really like to know from someone more knowledgeable than I what needs to be done to a shader for it to display in GG? I'd really like to use my old shader collection.



-Wolf

I got an endless amount of green rather than black screens at first, but I've now read a couple of books on this which has helped hugely, though still have to be careful in context of GG as they mostly cover DX10 & 11 rather than 9.

These books were - HLSL Development Cookbook & Real-Time 3D Rendering with directX and HLSL: A Practical Guide to Graphics Programming.

Not sure this helps a lot with your request though

The tricky thing about shaders are that they rely a lot on elements passed in by the graphics engine, and if those things are different, or absent, then the shader will not perform as expected (or at all). GameGuru saw the creation of a whole new batch of shaders to reproduce the new visuals required such as multi-textured terrain, cascade shadows, different shader techniques for quality levels, and of course, the post process shader which has seen the addition of motion blur, depth of field, adaptive bloom and most recently SAO.

My advice would be to take the new GameGuru shaders and tweak those, much like you did back in the day, to achieve the additional visual effects you are after for your games. Just make sure you back them up as when GameGuru auto-updates via Steam, those shader changes are overwritten with the official ones so giving them new names and placing them in a new folder is a good idea.

@cybernescence: Thank you, but I don't aim to go this deep into the material. I'm already behind with the reading I have to do for my work so I can't start reading books about the hobby that is supposed to get my mind off my work. Err...yes. I was hoping for some easy and lazy tweaks that would get them working rather than writing my own shaders.

@Lee: Yes! The shaders that come with reloaded are at least well documented in the files themselves so I have an idea what I am doing. This will do for now, thank you



-Wolf

@Wolf - I know what you mean, well the book refs may help others maybe. You can obviously find a lot via google too but I needed to understand a bit more to place the HLSL snippets and chat in context. I was looking for volumetric fog references (as I need low lying fog for old London in game), and managed to get enough insight to make a start. Standard linear GG fog shader at top, with new revised one below. I'm loving Game Guru even more now!

Nice one cybernescence!
Are you using vertes shader + pixel shader?
I've noticed Direct3D 10, DDS files supporting texture arrays.
DDS is going to change a bit.

3com