Show HN: ShaderLab – My WebGL Social Network | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: ShaderLab – My WebGL Social Network

shaderlab.mgz.me

36 pointsmgzme18 comments

Thank you all so much for the feedback. I really appreciate your time. I still have to publish a lot of usage documentation on the website, but I'd like to inform an important feature through this thread: If you press F9 with the editor focused, you put the editor on VIM mode, so you can work with features like regexp find and replace for example. The vim mode will, in a near future, to be toggled trough a toggle switch in the UI.

Very cool. It does something weird to my back button though - I had to use the tab history to get back to HN.

I'm already aware of the unfortunate problem with the history behavior and it is on top of my priority fixes to do right away. Thank you so much for the feedback, I really appreciate it.

I don’t know a thing about WebGL, but this is really neat, and the visuals are really fun. Great work!

I love how the code font is really crisp even on top of the visuals. Excellent work!

Thank you so much. I really appreciate the feedback. It is on my to do list to make a selector available with a set of syntax highlighting color-schemes so the user can customize the editor. Besides that, I tried to be as neutral as possible on the whole UI identity and colors (or lack of them) trying not to steal attention from the shader being edited.

why do you call it a "social network"? Is it really one? (I see likes, etc. should it be?

when I see that phrase, my interest level goes down a lot... you may be better off without it.

You may be right. I'd like to receive more opinions like yours concerning how to define it better. It's absolutely not "just an editor" as per its comments and likes features. I'm also developing right now a Follow/Unfollow and a TimeLine mode, in which you will be able to follow users with impressive work on the platform, and you'll have access to a separate Shader Gallery composed by all the shaders published by the users you follow (sort by creation date-time). So yes, it counts with some social network features. But maybe it is in fact an overstatement to classify it as a social network. I'm totally open to suggestions from the community, and I thank you for questioning it. I really appreciate all the criticism and feedback.

Sounds _exactly_ like Shadertoy. Is this different somehow?

From a quick glance, it has some feature that ShaderToy really lacks, like choosing the rendering resolution and being more mobile-friendly. On the other hand, there is also a lot of thing lacking that ShaderToy has, like multiple stage shader.

It look more like a web version of Bonzomatic than a clone of ShaderToy :) .

Indeed there are some awesome features in ShaderToy that I won't be able to implement (like, for example, the possibility of using SoundCloud as an audio input source. Unfortunately SoundCloud is not providing new developer API access keys anymore, I don't know why). The multi-pass feature is in development, but it will be implemented with a slightly different approach concerning ShaderToy's implementation. Thanks a lot for the feedback.

Props to you :) ! Being able to choose the render resolution is already a killer-feature for me (or anybody who got a laptop with a cheap integrated GPU ^^).

If I got one feedback to give, it would be to have a quick style switcher on the website. Some shader make the code difficult to see properly (like dark shader on top of this dark theme).

I'll definitely consider your suggestions. I'm still trying to figure the best way to let the user to customize the whole UI and Editor. I already planned custom syntax highlighting color schemes, and I already implemented the editor's position and size toggle switches. I'd love to receive more detailed suggestions regarding UI / editor customization. Thank you so much. BTW: If anyone wants to contact me for feature suggestions, all my contact information can be found at my personal website ( https://mgz.me ). My best regards!

Indeed it is similar to Shadertoy (or any other live GLSL editor like, for example, the live editor from The Book of Shaders ( https://thebookofshaders.com/ - which I really recommend, VERY good source for learning, helped me a lot! ), but I wanted to have a set of more flexible features to fit my personal usage like, for example, using any external images (from imgur or any other website that allows cross-domain access) as sampler2D-uniform texture inputs, or using my own MP3 files to be FFT analysed and produce audio-reactive shaders with more combinations of frequency bands and averages available, the resolution selector, export to GIF, etc. I still have to document and publish all the set of uniforms available and provide an usage guide to make all the features more clear. There's already some incredibly great live GLSL editors around, all of them with their bright features (and the lack of some good ones). My intention was not to produce a clone, but to contribute with a different set of tools to the same purpose.

This is a slight derail, so apologies, but: I've been just starting to get interested in shaders, and have been spending time reading things on shadertoy and working through BoS. Something I find really annoying about shadertoy is the pretty ubiquitous focus on minimizing code size, which I can understand in the context of demoscene, but which is super annoying when you're trying to read something to understand it.

What I'd love to see is something like an 'annotated shadertoy', which encourages inline documentation and explanation of the various moving parts. If anything like this exists, I'd love to hear about it!

Some shaders author are really good at commenting their code. Shane for example. And top quality shaders on top of that https://www.shadertoy.com/user/Shane

There are countless insanely talented creators at ShaderToy. Shane, IQ and FabriceNeyret for example. I try to learn from their code as much as I can, but I still don't even scratch the surface of their talent. Those guys creations are an inspiration, and I can only hope to learn a fraction of everything they share with the community.

ShaderToy is a mature and very large community, thus, you can find all types of shaders there. But I can ensure you that there are a lot of users at their platform doing their best to help beginners. FabriceNeyret, for example, comments on lots of shaders, giving optimization tips and making constructive suggestions. Yes, there are some hard to figure shaders there, but there are also very experienced users helping the community. And thanks for the suggestion, I really appreciate it. I'll do my best to make more "documented" shaders to share the little I know with the community.

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