Garage games is coming out with a shader editor -- called TGS I believe. Packaged with the Torque Game Engine, it will cost USD$295. IMHO shaders are not fully implemented in 3DGS unless you know shader programming.

If you are not into it, like me, you take what you can scrape up from the forums and ponder it and say, that's OK but...

What we really need is a shader editor so everybody can create shaders whether or not they know the low level programming language. I got 3DGS to simplify -- so I could focus on game development. I could follow the tutorials to code directly in DirectX but it would take months to get anywhere and I would be bored by the time I did get somewhere. Same with shaders: give me an editor and then I'm into it.

People have exported from ATI's render monkey but I have not had a lot of success with that for various reasons.

Another thing we really need to make shaders work is real-time environment mapping, not just static skycubes.