Content area
Full Text
THE SKINNY ON NEW TOOLS
ATI's RenderMonkey 1.5
With most major graphics card vendors offering up DirectX9 and OpenGL 1.4 compliant (shader-capable) hardware, real-time shader development is becoming more viable and important. To help further this technology, ATI plans to release version 1.5 of its RenderMonkey shader development utility at GDC 2004. There may be some differences between the version reviewed here, which was a preview version available at press time, and the final 1.5 version.
RenderMonkey 1.5 is a huge improvement over 1.0. ATI has spent a lot of time listening to the suggestions from developers and artists, adding the features that are most important to them. To say the entire interface has been revised to make it easier to write shaders would be an understatement. Featuring improved editing, better error reporting, support for multiple render targets, and better workflow integration, and an additional shader language, this is a significant update.
Editing features and OpenGL support. The editing environment retains most of the modular design of the previous version but features some drastic revisions in terms of streamlining interaction with the user. The entire interface has been revised to resemble Visual Studio.NET. Many of the windows are now floating windows that can be moved outside the main window or docked, as in Visual Studio. In fact the syntax highlighting and editing preferences are all designed to mimic those found in Visual Studio, since that's the development environment most folks writing PC games are using. The syntax colors are also configurable. Most of these underlying rules for the environment configuration are editable XML or text files, allowing you to easily create custom rules for syntax, project-specific variable declarations, and so on. There are syntax files for DirectX's low-level shader code, DirectX's high-level code (HLSL), and OpenGL 1.4's shader language (GLSL).
Though the HLSL compiler is part of DirectX, it's part of the driver in OpenGL (I'll let you ponder the shading language optimization implications). This means you'll need a card that contains at least an OpenGL 1.4 level driver (which should be available from both ATI and SDLabs by the time you read this) to try out GLSL. Using...