Thank you all for your responses guys!
@JCL, just so you know I am not the greatest programmer and I know very little about shaders outside of the research I have done to further educate myself on the subject. Taking a look at the link I posted, I was thinking something along the lines of that but instead of it simply being a simple "shader editor" it'd be more along the lines of an "environment editor" if you will since the end user would be able to customize/create their own integrated shaders. Maybe parameters like...
color saturation
color brightness
color contrast
hdr_amount
sunlight brightness
sunlight fade_amount
sunlight gamma
shadow depth(how dark/light shadows are)
shadow shadow_falloff (shadows edge blur/fade amount)
shadow saturation
shadow contrast
shadow gamma
Then the users would be able to add test lights of varying styles with similar parameters. Again, I am not sure how easy/difficult something like this would be. But this is just how I felt this could be used. Then after the user got their lighting the way they wanted, they would be able to export/generate the lighting system and begin making shaders around the lighting system.
Within this new tool there would also be a visual shader editor where the user would build their own shaders. They would be able to look at some of the default presets to visually see how the shader creation process works, then they could begin making their own shaders. As a reference, here are some projects which are similar to the Lite-Tree idea...
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/56180-Strumpy-Shader-Editor-4.0a-Massive-Improvementshttp://waylon-art.com/LearningUnreal/UE3-11-MaterialBasics.htmhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=131rjsgtkdc (Not the level editor, but how the lighting is controlled)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0Mn8UVtvA4@Ratchet, Yes a visual library of commonly used shaders would be a great tool indeed. Unfortunately, as stated before, you cant just magically make shaders work together as they use different lighting and shadow rendering systems. Thats where this hypothetical tool could shine.
This would indeed be a lot of work, more than just one man could do within a reasonable amount of time. I am still learning about shaders so I can try to make a tool like this become a reality. It would be great to have some sort of proof of concept to be able to show JCL and the community. I wouldnt want credit or money or anything like that. Hell if I had a working version I'd just GIVE it to conitec. My only goal for this idea is purely to make 3DGS the best game engine it can be.
