shaded

shaded is a development tool for writing and previewing glsl fragment shaders, in the spirit of:

• The Book of Shaders editor
• Shadertoy
• GLSLbin
• GLSL Sandbox
• atom-glsl-preview
• vscode-glsl-canvas

Features

1. Bring your own text editor.

2. Run your shader while you code, with hot reloading on save.

3. Share and reuse code with glslify:

   #pragma glslify: noise = require('glsl-noise/simplex/2d')
   #pragma glslify: smoothUnion = require('./smoothUnion')

4. Built in uniforms (compatible with The Book of Shaders):

   uniform vec2 u_resolution;
   uniform vec2 u_mouse;
   uniform float u_time;

5. Texture loading by comment:

   uniform sampler2D bump; // ../textures/brick_wall.jpg

All of these features are available in atom-glsl-preview, but I switched from Atom to VSCode a while back, so I wanted to be able to write shaders in any text editor. vscode-glsl-canvas is pretty great, but doesn't support glslify or simple texture loading. Instead of tying myself to a particular editor, I decided to write a more generic tool that simply worked with my file system and a browser.

NOTE: If you're coming from atom-glsl-preview, the behavior of u_mouse has changed: instead of providing normalized mouse coordinates (0 to 1), u_mouse will match the coordinates of gl_FragCoord (divide by u_resolution to get back to normalized coordinates). This makes the behavior match that of The Book of Shaders editor.

As in recent versions of atom-glsl-preview, no precision specifiers or uniform declarations will be added to your shader automatically—what you code is what you get.

Install

npm install --global shaded

Or, with yarn:

yarn global add shaded

Usage

Start the server in the current directory:

$ shaded
shaded listening at http://localhost:3000

Open http://localhost:3000 in your browser to see a listing of the files in the current directory. Navigating to a file ending with the extension .glsl will open a page showing the shader in a WebGL canvas.

Examples

• /examples in this repository
• https://fordhurley.com/shaders
• https://github.com/fordhurley/shaders

Development

• Start the build "watchers":

   yarn run server-watch
   yarn run frontend-watch
  

• Start the server (needs to be manually restarted after a change):

   node dist/server/index.js
  

• Open a browser to the examples: http://localhost:3000/examples

Publishing

shaded is automatically published to npm by Github Actions when a new release is created in the Github repository.

Before each release:

1. Manually test all of the examples.
2. Update CHANGELOG.md.
3. Bump the version number in package.json, following semver.

Then, create a Release in the Github UI.

TODO

• More testing (especially cross platform/browser).
• Show/copy original source and "compiled" (glslified) source.
• Show line errors when viewing source.
• Custom file extensions.
• Browse "gallery" with previews.
• Play/pause controls.
• Export frames/video.
• Custom uniform sliders.
• Custom programmable uniforms (e.g. mouse clicks, keyboard, date).
• Video textures.
• Multiple buffers.