More information about the shader language

Hello. Please forgive me for my English. I have not developed anything on this engine yet and am just looking at it, and I also remember Pascal, which I have not used for a long time. I have not developed games before either. I would like to know about shaders: 1) does this engine require deep knowledge of the shader language? 2) is it possible to do without using this language at first, using only the built-in tools of the engine? 3) how much will the graphics suffer without using the shader language?

Hello!

No worries about your English. Note that I translated the title of your thread to English, hopefully I captured the core of your question right.

Not at all. You don’t need to know the shader language (OpenGL Shading Language, GLSL) at all to use Castle Game Engine.

If you know GLSL, then you can do some additional effects for your games (see Shader Effects (Compositing Shaders) | Castle Game Engine ) but it’s really completely optional. All the standard engine rendering, all the effects mentioned on Features | Castle Game Engine – they just work, you don’t need to write shader code for this.

( To be clear, the engine is still using shading language underneath, everything that is rendered using modern OpenGL is using shading language. But you don’t see it, the proper shaders are auto-generated and used, without the need from you to do anything. )

Absolutely yes, as per above.

The graphics will not “suffer” at all if you don’t know shading language. Everything from Features | Castle Game Engine , like Physically-Based Rendering, shadows, mirrors, bump mapping, all standard 3D rendering features – it just works, you don’t need to know the shading language.

Without knowledge of GLSL, you will not be able to add some extra effects – whether it matters, depends on your game. Some examples of 3D effects where you need shaders is “volumetric fog” ( Shader Effects (Compositing Shaders) | Castle Game Engine ) or screen-space post-processing effects ( Screen (Post-Processing) Effects | Castle Game Engine ). You need to know shading language to create them… but of course you can also just use one of our ready examples of them.