Mirage’s Features & Tools #9

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of gameplay code hot-reload or shaders live edit at runtime without the need to re-build the editor or engine.
For shaders, it comes in multiple forms, probably the most known one nowadays is the shader graphs (like Unreal and Unity material editors), or less popular such as online shader code editors such as Shadertoy. But I wanted to have something that works faster than Unreal, Unity or Shadertoy and at the same time still shader code not graphs (graphs is another topic for another time), and hence the task for live shader editing was spawned ~8 months ago.

Thankfully, this past weekend i was able to close that task, as there are yet (as demonstrated in the video) 3 different methods of updating the running engine instance with shader changes at runtime, without the need to close the engine or rebuild it.

Don’t forget, all the videos are in this playlist

-m