Geometry Shader?

lethal-raptor-games

Is the geometry shader available at the moment? I thought I saw somewhere that someone had used it, but I may be wrong...

Megalomaniak

The shader language api does not expose it. But on the engine source level perhaps you could.

Calinou

@Megalomaniak said: The shader language api does not expose it. But on the engine source level perhaps you could.

If you take both desktop and mobile/web platforms into account, Godot uses OpenGL versions that do not support geometry shaders. With a lot of work, you could modify the engine source code to expose geometry shaders in GLES3 on desktop platforms only (since GLES3 maps to OpenGL 3.3 on desktop platforms).

Megalomaniak

Yeah, that's what I'd expect.

lethal-raptor-games

Thanks, will 4.0 support it? Is Vulkan supposed to replace GLES3...?

Megalomaniak

4.0 should have both an advanced/vulkan renderer and a lighter GLES renderer.

I do not know of any plans in regards to geometry shaders, but realistically you'd be better off using compute shaders instead of geometry shaders for performance reasons anyways. And down the line may even get access to mesh shaders in the future perhaps.

cybereality

I haven't worked with geometry shaders myself (and they do have uses) but most people I've heard from say that they are bad, low performance, and in general almost no games use them.