Greetings,
I'm thinking about buying A6 Commercial and have some questions about shaders. What are shaders in GS A6? I mean, does A6 shaders work as Quake 3 ones and can be run on low-end cards? For instance, I have GForce 440 MX and I can see shaders work but no pixel programs from DirectX 9.
Does A6 have it's own high-level shader script, so I can create shaders for low-end cards (like Cipher engine has)? Is there any shader editor in A6?

Thank you!

What is used in Quake III aren't shaders. Your card doesn't support shaders. BUT you can accomplish all effects quake III has (afaik). 3dgs doesn't have an own shader language. Why should it if it uses DirectX? Anyway even if you have an old card (mine is a gf2 mx400 so also no support of shaders) you can do a lot with a6 com's "material" because it also supports "fixed functions" which are on your graphic card - such as Dot3 bumpmapping, environment mapping, embm, multitexturing etc.

Yes, Quake 3's are not shader in idea of DirectX or OpenGL. But very nice approach
Do you think I can do like this: movie ?
Without placing avi on a texture but just using a texture function?

You don't even need a shader for this. Just a model with three different skins + uv-movement (well, this shall be done by "effects" now but is the same as my.u += time;)

aha! I see the point. Thanks!

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.

A shader editor is on the way, as well as a shader library with standard shader effects.

Check the forecast page!

even with a shader editor you still need knowledge(sure you can click together different parts like adding reflections and toon, or what is offered in the editors base, but...). taking rendermonkey for example if you dont know what you are doing you will get as much errors as using a texteditor and 3dgs;-)
keep on trying, get some books (realtime shader programming, shaderX) and look into the dx8 sdk (or dx9) and try the search engine there.

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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...

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Well I think a lot of people use this tactic, also with 'learning' scripting... Although I can't really blame them (it's a sort of 'easy' way to 'learn', they think), sometimes you see some cloned code, which is quite disturbing if it's your own...

@ello: Which books do you have for shaders? I think I've seen some 'shader for noobs' books, but which would you recommend, apart from reading / trying to understand the DX8/DX9 documents on shaders??????

Cheers

edit: Oww, wait a sec, you meant www.shaderx.com ?!

exactly ! and a very good book is "realtime shader programming" from ron fosner. this is really very good