I see that shaders have become quite the craze around here, yet many people are having trouble creating them and implementing them. I for the most part understand shaders, and a bit of C++/DirectX. I am going to attempt to design a Shader Editor/GUI for the community, in my spare time. Is anyone interested in this? My ideas would be to iclude a shader editor/generator, direct code editor, shader library, export to .fx and .wdl, and much more. Please give me some suggestion, and ideas you want for features. Any donated shaders would really help for the library to!

that would be absolutely great, as i almost do some experiments which look nice, but i dont know exactly what i am doing.
i think nearly everyone here would love it

Five Stars for this good idea.

Good Idea!

Greetings
Stephan Bayer

Excellent idea.

Sounds wonderful,
Can't wait if you go ahead with this.

I suggested this a few months ago for the templates and it would fit here as well. Support creating wizard code templates so that we could take someones shader code and turn it into a template and change values.

For example turn ....

my.speed = 50
etc

into

my.speed = [popup, 1, 50,"Enter a value between 1 and 50 to set speed"]

which would popup a message and accept a value between 1 and 50. The benefit of this is new users could make safe changes by starting with a template and get a bit of hand holding to what values are ok to change and in what range. The generated code could be further edited manually. By creating some simple tags like this people who create shaders might be inclined to add them to their code so that the shaders could be used by others in the shader generator.

The other consideration is whether (and I know nothing about the subject) it might be better to instead support a product like RenderMonkey which is free and maybe create a tool that would 3DGS-ify any code it produces rather than recreate everything from the ground up -just a thought not sure what is best.

A shader editor? Yes! That would be great as I have no experience with C++ (except that I have 50% of the knowledge of C#) and 3DGS only support C++ (and of course, Delphi). With the shader editor, I don't have to have experience with shader language (HLSL for DirectX 9.0).

There is a free program from ATI called "RenderMonkey" which is quickly becoming the industry standard for making shaders. If you can come up with a easy method to export shaders from RenderMonkey to A6 then you would have a very powerful tool.