Few shaders questions...

Hi!
I am new to all this and I dont have clue about shaders, but in my previous posts about realistic water I was suggested to use shaders for realistic water so...
1.) What edition of A6 support shaders (I have extra edition)?
2.) What are shaders?
3.) How to use shaders (in theory, do i have to prepare more skin/texture or does A6 create something that is so far beyond my knowledge)?

Well enough for now, when I understand a little bit more I will come with clever questions

P.S. Sorry for my english

1) You need at least the commercial edition.
2) Since the GeForce GPUs support hardware T&L, which does the transform and lighting in hardware. Cause it's build into the hardware, it's fixed to certain effects. The shaders make the vertex and pixel processing programmable, therefore more flexible.
3) To programm a shader you need to write an assabler code which the GPU can understand/execute. If you just want to use it, it's shader specific what to do, normaly adding different skin maps is enough.

Thanks! I am saving for the upgrade (but I am not sure should I upgrade to com or pro edition). Well nothing of my realistic water for now...

One thing that I want to let you know is if you're going to program shaders, you have to have knowledge and experience with C++ and DirectX 8.

... I think you will do fine with Com.

Take it from a Pro user, get Commerical. (kicks self in rear) You can always upgrade to pro later based on what you NEED.

Thanks guys. I think I will go with commercial upgrade(it looks like there is not big difference between com and pro, at least not for that money, depends what you need, right.)