MojoShader

September 24th, 2008: Source code released to the world!

MojoShader is a library to work with Direct3D shaders on alternate 3D APIs and non-Windows platforms. The primary motivation is moving shaders to OpenGL languages on the fly. The developer deals with "profiles" that represent various target languages, such as GLSL or ARB_*_program.

This allows a developer to manage one set of shaders, presumably written in Direct3D HLSL, and use them across multiple rendering backends. This also means that the developer only has to worry about one (offline) compiler to manage program complexity, while MojoShader itself deals with the reduced complexity of the bytecode at runtime.

MojoShader provides both a simple API to convert bytecode to various profiles, and (optionally) basic glue to rendering APIs to abstract the management of the shaders at runtime.

Work is in progress to allow MojoShader to work as a replacement stack for the D3DX shader tools. The library already provides a preprocessor and an assembler to generate bytecode from low-level source, and construction of a full HLSL compiler is in progress.

The library is meant to be statically linked to an application (just add a few .c files and headers to your build), allows the app to optionally specify an allocator, and is thread safe (although OpenGL itself is not). It is meant to be embedded in games with a minimum of fuss.

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Page maintained by Ryan C. Gordon.