Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Shaders
Shaders are used in GameMaker to perform simple or advanced graphical effects. This in-
cludes everything from a real-time Gaussian blur to 2D and 3D lighting. Shaders are ex-
tremely powerful and work by directly editing things that are being drawn by the GPU.
When no shader is applied, GameMaker will still draw sprites and backgrounds using a de-
fault shader that has no effect on the graphics.
A GPU, stands for graphics processing unit, is more often called a graphics card. It is a
device that allows a computer to draw a display onto a computer monitor. The more graph-
ics that need to be drawn to the screen at once, the faster and better a GPU needs to be to
handle it all.
GameMaker uses open GLSL ES by default; however, it also accepts regular GLSL,
HLSL, and PSSL as its shader language and the limitations really depend on the user's
knowledge of the selected language.
GLSL stands for OpenGL Shading Language. GLSL is a high-level shading language
based on the syntax of C programming and allows developers to have more direct control
of the graphics pipeline, using a more commonly known language structure.
The graphics pipeline is the queue of graphics that are to be drawn by the GPU at any one
time.
