You normally don't use the depth buffer in a shader. For depth information the scene depth is usually rendered into a floating point texture. This is possible with the beta version.

All effects mentioned here can be done by users. However I am aware of the usual problems with user shaders posted on the shader forum. When developing a shader for your own purposes, it's a lot of additional work to provide an easy template for making the shader available to beginners. Therefore all the newbie problems with shaders. When you're following the beta features, you see that we're developing a shader template collection.

Any user contributions to the shader collection are very welcome. If you need any certain engine feature for a shader effect, please post a request to this section. Shader feature requests will be treated with high priority, and shader devlopers can join the beta team.