I have been always interested with real time graphics ever since when I was a kid. At around time when 8 bit computer was my first pc, I was using basic Programming language to draw – erase and looping them over to create a scene with my beloved R2 model moving across the screen.

Time has passed and the real time graphics Technology has evolved a lot. Now we take hardware accelerated pixel and vertex shaders as a standard.

But it was only very recently, I have actually tried to write my own and learn to write a shader in a HLSL. HLSL stands for High Lvel Shader Language and it allows to write a complex hardware shader without actually writing into a machine code.

There were mainly two shader authorizing tool that I could use for free. Fx Composer from Nvidia and Render Monkey from ATI. They were ok for the most of the simple shaders, but I have quickly found them to be inadquate.

I am not trying to say that my shaders were too “good” to be run under both applications. But it was rather because I needed a more control of the actual rendering pipeline. Things like render to texture , looping were not supported in the manor I wanted them to be.

So I turned to my good friend Andrew Griffiths. He is an excellent programmer who has very extensive knowlege in this field. He agreed to work with me to come up with our own shader editor. The shader editor is based on XNA frame and the idea is to be able to script the rendering pipeline to fit whatever the shader’s needs.