What tools do you use for fx effects debuging and creating??

What tools do you use for fx effects debuging and creating?

Iam new with it. So I would like to know basics, best practice, and best tools for it.

there is good plugins like HLSL Tools for Visual Studio.

For debugging you can use tools like Intel GPA or renderdoc. Apart from that the default monogame content pipeline will give you detailed compiler errors if you have any.

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Just wanted to add that the built-in graphics debugger in Visual Studio 2015 helps to quickly take a snapshot of a frame and analysing it. It helped me out in one or another situation.

If you use Visual Studio as your IDE you can find it under “Debug -> Graphics”.

Other than that you should install the HLSL Tools, which Kosmonaut mentioned in his post, as they are very helpful writing your shader.

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I just use an Angelscript IDE that I wrote a few years ago. Tossed in HLSL, GLSL and OpenCL grammars and called it a day. Since shader/compute languages are close enough to Angelscript/C++ most of my smart-autocomplete stuff worked out of the box.

Used Notepad++ alot along time ago. Used to write them right in Eclipse as constant strings, :dizzy_face: half the time with LibGDX back in the old days when asset management in LibGDX was too atrocious to bother with files much.

I wrote a bunch of stuff for doing them via graph based materials but I haven’t used it beyond proving that it works and has sane output. A graph-basis requires setting a lot of things in stone - and I’m not ready to set anything down that hard.


Shaders aren’t tough though. It’s pretty much just reading the specs and examples help with those few ambiguities.

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