Here is a small update: the shaders I wrote recently were a raw port of existing materials from Cinema4D. I was really amazed by the simplicity of the Cinema shader material system and how easy it is to port shaders to HLSL - so I decided to integrate that kind of material pipeline into my game. I did that for the shaders you see above.

But this is hardcoded and the approach itself is modular.

To be flexible and to integrate the shaders into my existing game code, I decided to write a template based shader compiler, for which I write tons of code right now.

This involves not only the code to compile shaders at runtime with templates and XML as shader definition, but also heavy coding on the essentials, like extending my string library, hashmaps, dictionaries and so on.

I also investigated in the meantime other possibilities for multiplatform support. I will certainly continue to develop the game with Gamestudio, but as soon as a certain degree of maturity is reached (end of 2015?), I guess I will switch to a cross-platform technology. Marmalade SDK is pretty promising but I still don't know how to work with it I am open for Unity, but the pricing is horrible! And I am still in long distance love with jMonkey