A walkthrough on developing a simple shader for gstudio would be awesome, if someone knows of one. Shaders work on level geometry and map entities?

Right now shaders only work on models and sprites.

As far as an simple walkthrough, there is a lot of background knowledge that you need to have if you want to understand even a simple shader. A good place to start is here.

thx! Will check it out.

What about pre-compiled wmp entities?

I dont think so cameron. In theory, wmb entities are still just geometry, just assembled by the engine(ie they cant have dynamic shadows). Of course I could be wrong.

Nadester is right. Shaders for level geometry requires reworking the way we handle levels (but that is already in the works as well).

I forgot to mention, you can use Shaders on terrian maps as well.

what is this shader thing ?
and whats bump mapping ?

I don't have the experience to answer on shader programing, all I know is it makes everything look better in the long run

But bump mapping is very interesting. If you look at a texture, it's flat, there's no depth to it. What bump mapping does is take a gray-scale bump map and apply it to the texture. You can think of it like a height map, different shades of gray make for different depths of bump, making the texture appear 3d with actual depth, despite it still being a 2d surface.

(I like that phrase fr some reason "different depths of bump" I think I'll use that whenever I bump a thread)

What shaders effectively allow you to do is to override the default rendering settings for 3D environments from your video card. This will allow you to make a number of changes to how things appear on screen. There are vast resources of information available concerning shaders online (GameDev have a bunch - FlipCode - nVidia and ATI - MSDN...). Still though, for DirectX 8 shaders your absolute best all in one resource is "ShaderX." Very good book, which covers almost everything you can think of. For those who are looking ahead, you might also want to check out "DirectX 9 - Programmable Graphics Pipeline." The first half of the book deals with general shaders and DirectX 8 style shaders, while the second half gets into the DirectX 9 style shaders (they effectively use two different languages for those who are on long term projects....).

What the bump mapping will actually do is just adjust the lighting. It is still the same low polygon figures (which is why you can not use a really low polygon figure with bump mapping and expect it to look great). The models outline looks exactly as it would with no bump mapping at all. Bump Maps are what are known as pixel shaders, in they change the textures appearance. There are also other things called vertex shaders which will alter the model itself.

No time to learn shading stuff just yet...so my question is this.

My game maps would need patches of grass, trees etc all with these gr8 shader tweaks etc. Would like to add this later, once more of the core elements of the game are in place. Is this possible etc [presume it is] and if so, what things are worth taking into consideration now? Can you reverse engineer levels to use new shader options?

plz forgive if lingo isn't accurate