how much can you learn from shadertoy?

I’ve always had an interest in shaders, but have been too busy with ever stuff to do more than dabble - from what I gather, shadertoy is limited, but the stuff there is very cool and I’ve been wanting to read the code and mess around with modifying it

my goal eventually is to create a 3D racing game that would be very shader heavy - I have so much to learn on the basics of everything!

I normally wouldn’t think such a thing is possible, but I had learned a few months ago that shadertoy can deal with input somehow (I never learned how exactly) when I saw this recreation of the first room of Quake on the site:

1 Like

It looks like it’s using shadertoy’s iChannels for it, if you open Buffer A and look down at iChannel0 you’ll see they’ve set it to keyboard input.

Here’s a simpler example of just keyboard input via arrow keys, and it’s another Buffer A with keyboard input iChannel: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ltsyRS

It’s some kind of workaround they have to toss keyboard data into a texture and provide accessor methods for reading the inputs back out in the shader. It’s something you could do yourself in a shader if you wanted to but it’s definitely a little weird and involved!

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.