[HN Gopher] The Book of Shaders
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       The Book of Shaders
        
       Author : Tomte
       Score  : 132 points
       Date   : 2022-07-16 12:52 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (thebookofshaders.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (thebookofshaders.com)
        
       | gabereiser wrote:
       | This site has css issues with font sizes that cause the site to
       | "shake" on mobile to the point where it's unusable.
       | 
       | That said, it's a great resource for shaders and I can't wait
       | until it's complete.
        
         | stemlord wrote:
         | Will it ever be complete? It's been in this state for the
         | better part of the past decade
        
           | gabereiser wrote:
           | Trying to encourage here.
        
             | stemlord wrote:
             | Yeah, thought you might be alluding to some inside
             | knowledge
        
         | vanattab wrote:
         | I dont know about unusable but annoying for sure
        
           | hughes wrote:
           | You might see a different behavior. The shaking I see makes
           | it literally impossible to read.
        
             | shepherdjerred wrote:
             | Me too. It only happens when you scroll on mobile and your
             | address bar disappears. When you reverse scroll it becomes
             | readable
             | 
             | Edit: it's not consistent: I refreshed the page and it was
             | pretty readable. Sometimes it is so shaky it's completely
             | illegible
        
       | thisispete wrote:
       | Too bad they never finished it
        
         | anewpersonality wrote:
         | Yep, amazing how someone can love something so much, then fall
         | deeply out of love of it. Sometimes I wish I had a savant-level
         | of dedication to something.
        
         | ImPleadThe5th wrote:
         | Yep, been waiting on the next chapters for years now. Will
         | probably never happen.
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | > In shader-land we don't have too many resources for debugging
       | besides assigning strong colors to variables and trying to make
       | sense of them. You will discover that sometimes coding in GLSL is
       | very similar to putting ships inside bottles. Is equally hard,
       | beautiful and gratifying.
       | 
       | Really? Is there no emulation environment? This DX (development
       | experience) seems ripe for disruption.
        
         | kevingadd wrote:
         | Step-through shader debugging has been available since DirectX
         | 9 or earlier. Microsoft shipped a debugger called PIX and a
         | reference shader rasterizer that PIX would use to generate a
         | reference image and let you step through how the shader should
         | behave. I used it extensively.
         | 
         | Reference rasterizers also exist for D3D11 (Windows ships with
         | one called WARP and it's fast enough to actually use for many
         | workloads). I think there might be one for D3D12 as well but
         | I'm not sure.
         | 
         | The dark ages 'printf with colors' stuff they describe is
         | somewhat unique to GLSL and is just a smaller example of how
         | the entire OpenGL ecosystem was horrible for debugging and not
         | well designed. These days people can use Vulkan or D3D11 if
         | they want an ecosystem that was designed intentionally and has
         | good tooling (D3D12 is more comparable to Vulkan but is
         | honestly not worth the trouble for most people yet). For a
         | taste of what good modern graphics debugging looks like, run a
         | modern game in Renderdoc and you can take a snapshot and then
         | pick a random pixel on-screen and step-through debug the
         | shader.
         | 
         | Naturally, game consoles have even better tooling. The PS4 SDK
         | let you step through the actual low level instructions running
         | on the GPU (I'm not sure if they were simulating execution or
         | not though...)
        
       | stevebmark wrote:
       | I actually wish this site would stop making the rounds now,
       | because it's abandoned and will never be updated to be a complete
       | shader tutorial.
        
         | fermentation wrote:
         | Very annoying when looking for shader tutorials on Google too.
         | This shouldn't be the recommended result. It's a cool intro
         | that leaves you without enough knowledge to "know what you
         | don't know"
        
         | weaksauce wrote:
         | seems like it's not completely abandoned but no major content
         | has been added to it:
         | https://github.com/patriciogonzalezvivo/thebookofshaders/com...
        
       | thegreatwhale8 wrote:
       | It is/was nice to learn from it all those years ago. I don't see
       | there's much (if any) further progress in completing it though.
        
         | itronitron wrote:
         | Book of shaders is a good intro, and a nice complement to Inigo
         | Quilez's https://iquilezles.org/ tutorials. While it has not
         | been updated in a while, Patricio is responsive on GitHub :)
        
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       (page generated 2022-07-16 23:00 UTC)