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High Level Shader Language (HLSL) Introduction |
Welcome to this introduction on DirectX and HLSL.
- HSL – What ?!?
- HLSL, DirectX’ High Level Shader Language
- But I don’t care about this HLSL, just show me some more DirectX code I can copy-paste into my own application!
Indeed, I could go on showing you more and more DirectX commands, defining some more renderstates, adding a point light, etc. Looking a bit further, it’s clear that all of these commands are at some point translated into commands for the hardware, the graphical card in your pc.
Before DirectX 8, game programmers could only use the Fixed Function Pipeline, meaning the commands provided by DirectX. Since DirectX 8, a lot of flexibility has been added to the way programmers can control their graphics cards. Since then, it’s possible to directly program the vertex and pixel shaders in the GPU, the Graphical Processing Unit. This way, programmers are able to program every graphical effect they could think of, thus bypassing the limited set of DirectX instructions.
- So what you’re saying is that I can throw away everything I’ve learnt about DirectX programming and start learning HLSL??
By all means, no. We’re still going to need 95% of what we’ve seen up till now. We still need to deliver our vertex information to the shaders. This means our whole scene will be created in DirectX. Only things like setting the device’s world matrix will be discarded, as we’ll perform these transformation manually.
- Why would you want to do this manually? The nice thing about DirectX is that it takes care of all the maths for us!
The more you can do manually, the more power you have about what is actually drawn on the screen. Hey, this is the 3rd series, it’s time we move on to something more advanced!
- So, in a nutshell, why would I want to start using this HLSL?
HLSL is used not to improve the gameplay, but to enhance the quality of the final image. Every vertex that is drawn will pass through your vertex shader, and even every pixel drawn will have passed through your pixel shader. The shaders can perform pretty much any manipulation you can think of on their data.
To demonstrate the use of HLSL and shaders, I have written this 3rd Series of DirectX tutorials. Have a look at the lighting on one of the screenshots. You can see they all cast shadows. This is a nice example of something that would be quite impossible to achieve without shaders. As with the previous Series, we’ll start by showing the basics, and gradually build up our application. In the end, you’ll have a complete overview of the meaning of shaders, and have a good understanding of what you can do with them! Pretty much what a tutorial should do, I guess..
So much for this introduction to HLSL. You might still be wondering where HLSL fits into the big picture. The image below demonstrates this, and will be explained while writing our first vertex and pixel shader in the next 2 chapters.
Click here to go to the forum on this chapter!
- Website design & XNA + DirectX code : Riemer Grootjans -
©2003 - 2011 Riemer Grootjans
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