Is there some ide available for glsl developping?

i’m a newbie to glsl,and have study the glsl grammar for some times,i want to know if there is some ide tools available to develop shader ? if only write shader by coding,how can peoples implement various graphic appearance?like the demos on www.shadertoy.com.thanks.

any reply would be highly appreciated,i just wonder if there’re common procedures can be used to develop a shader program,in my opinion, shader is hard to debug,if only write shader source code from scratch without any auxiliary tools helping,seems hard to implement the required effect,isn’t it ?

There are some shader authoring tools from Nvidia and AMD but afaik they are discontinued and thus lack support for the later graphics APIs: FX Composer from Nvidia and ShaderMonkey from AMD.

I am used to write my shaders in a text editor with syntax hightlighting (here: Notepad++ with GLSL highlighting) and one of the Quick Reference Guides on my side. I don’t know if there are any other editors which also support GLSL code completion.

If you want to write shaders like the good ones on the shadertoy site, you need a good mathematics background and a smart and/or crazy mind. :wink: I would recommend to start with easier tasks first and then increase difficulty as you progress. There are also a lot of tutorials on the internet which discuss various shader effects. Just start the google engine.

There are a few tools on the internet which can be used for debugging shaders. First to mention and most recommended is Nvidia’s Nsight which supports OpenGL/GLSL up to version 4.2. Second is AMD’s GPU PerfStudio 2 which is not as comfortable to use as Nsight. Another method to debug shader code is to use additional render targets for debug outputs which you could draw in another (smaller or separate) viewport later. Since the GPU is a massively parallel and highly pipelined device it is very hard to debug, that’s true.

Visual Studio has an extension called GLSL language integration, you can download it via Extension→Manage Extensions.
I am using it now, and I think it’s pretty cool, enough to meet my demands.

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