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Comment by SeriousM | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me, as not so 3d savy, that 3d objects and shaders have a similar connection as html structure and css. Nowadays you need a structure of objects yet the layout, color and behavor comes from css.

In this regard, 3d scenes offer the elements but shaders can design them much more efficient than a engine ever could.

Is that accurate?

Btw, can objects modified by shaders signal collisions?

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3D scenes (closest thing to the DOM) and materials (closest thing to CSS) are several abstraction layers above what modern 3D APIs provide, this is more 'rendering/game engine' territory.

3D APIs are more on the level of 'draw this list of triangles, and the color of a specific pixel in the triangle is computed like this: (hundreds of lines of pixel shader code)" - but even this is slowly being being replaced by even lower level code which implements completely custom rendering pipelines entirely on the GPU.

Shaders are not layout. I don't think there is an HTML/DOM analogy here that works. But if you had to force one, shaders are more like Javascript. It's a terrible analogy though.

Collisions aren't part of a graphics API.

> Collisions aren't part of a graphics API.

You can do occlusion queries though, which is a form of 2D collision detection similar to what home computer sprite hardware provided ;)

There is, CSS shaders, or Project Houdini.

- https://alteredqualia.com/css-shaders/article/

- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Houdini_API...

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