I’m not a fan of the minified glsl that guys like this produce but I do get a chuckle when variable declarations spell out damnit. The frustrations are real.
That aside, i love the work, I just hate having to mentally grok the d and c style variables. As if number of chars minimum is the goal. Number of instructions yes, but we can do better than d and t.
If there was some absolute measure of program 'interestingness'/'readability', programs found on shadertoy would no doubt have an asymptotically high score.
My theory is that graphics programmers, at some point, stop having to care very much about what the textual representation of their program actually looks like. Because graphics programming is so hard, once you get to the point of understanding what you're doing, and typing in the shader, it becomes self-explanatory; you don't actually need variable names, what you need is understanding.
Inigo Quilez (author of shadertoy, and graphics programming legend) is one of the most talented graphics programmers alive, and produces some of the least readable code I've ever seen.
Just my 2c on why this is so common in graphics, specifically
I am a graphics programmer. It still enrages me to see those variables but (but) I understand that most of the time, it’s that way in the math. So the math variable becomes the shader variable name. Ugh.
I love me a good float lut = lut_equation(uv, lutTex) * lut_factor.r
Thanks for putting this together. Shaders are something I wish I had the time to dive deep into, but since I'm making a game, my time is very limited for the time being. i.e. I only learn what I need to.
Only critique is.. if you're sharing to teach, your compact/one line [460] char GLSL code is a poor delivery mechanism.
> Only critique is.. if you're sharing to teach, your compact/one line [460] char GLSL code is a poor delivery mechanism.
Understandable. Though, the demos are here to illustrate "what you can do with the trick I'm sharing". It's like, I'm teaching you how to do watercolor, and illustrate it with some paintings you won't be able to perform just with that knowledge. They're meant to inspire you to create. You're not looking at a tutorial, you're looking at art.
For once instead of being shoved a ready-made solution there's a short explanation of the core idea with a live example, but instead of a fully documented shadertoy it's like the answer is ROT13'd which makes me itch for implementing a solution myself.
Nice looking demos, I hope to some day manage to get results close to what you have.
I started playing around with GLSL recently and the closest I have come to describing working with it is that it is like creating poetry using math. Getting started was much easier than I expected, getting good results is so far as hard as expected
Thank you for the kind words, and you're on point with "poetry using math".
I started 2-3 months ago or so doing this stuff, so don't be too intimidated to start. Especially with the two articles (Red Alp and this one), it should make it more accessible, hopefully :)
Awesome stuff. Moonlight and Archipelago are particularly beautiful. I work in shaders fairly regularly (mainly Metal-based), and it still amazes me how so little code can produce seemingly infinite universes.
I'm oddly fascinated with GLSL shaders recently because I've been trying out a terminal which supports shaders. I have currently applied a retro terminal shader and love using terminal this way.
What's a good way to get started learning to build/customize shaders with GLSL? I have an engineering math background but I was never the best at math. And GLSL syntax looks a bit tedious to be honest, but I'd love to dive in.
> And GLSL syntax looks a bit tedious to be honest, but I'd love to dive in.
With the vectorization everywhere, it's surprisingly convenient given how simple the syntax is. I personally just miss some sinpi/cospi/etc, and/or a PI and TAU constant.
That's also a good test for chatbots: give it a picture and ask it to write a shadertoy demo that make this picture a 3d animation. So far the results are meh.
That aside, i love the work, I just hate having to mentally grok the d and c style variables. As if number of chars minimum is the goal. Number of instructions yes, but we can do better than d and t.
Moonlight is beautiful.
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