Will Godot 4 have a richer shading language?

kitfox

I've worked with OpenGL and GLSL in the past and am finding Godot's shading language very limiting. You seem locked into a fairly generic shading pipeline with vertex data being limited to [position, normal, uv0, uv1, color], a small selection of blend modes, no multipass support and only one render buffer. This also eliminates some of the wilder things you can do with shaders where you use them for things other than simply shading meshes.

I was wondering if Godot 4 will introduce a richer environment for using and abusing shaders (with something more akin to GLSL) or if the 3.* shading system will remain in place?

TwistedTwigleg

I think Godot is still going to use it's shader language in Godot 4.0 as the default option. However, I think I remember reading in one of the blog posts that it will be possible to load GLSL shaders directly as well, for more low-level access and support.

Edit: Here's the blog post mentioning low-level shader support :smile:

Calinou

The shader language has received a lot of changes for Godot 4.0, many of which have been backported to 3.x: https://godotengine.org/article/improvements-shaders-visual-shaders-godot-4