ZScript function for checking if pp shaders are supported

[Marisa the Magician]

Rather than commit the long-forbidden crime of attempting to detect renderers, it would be preferable to have something on the ui side for checking if shaders can be used since, at the moment, software renderers can't do pp shaders (despite the fact they're still using an accelerated framebuffer).

I'm not familiar with the rendering side of the engine, so I can't do much myself for this.

[Xaser]

Related post of mine -- I'll quote the relevant bit so it's in context:

What we could really use here is a new feature: a set of MAPINFO flags that declare "I require feature 'x'", e.g. sloped 3D Floors or Truecolor, and have the engine output a warning if a user starts up the map with a renderer that doesn't support one of the declared features. This doesn't expose anything to ZScript, and since it's detecting the feature, not the renderer, it's future-proof -- e.g. if the Carmack renderer magically gets sloped 3D floors, it's marked as supported internally and the warning goes away for maps that declare it.

Works a bit differently since there's no ZScript exposure, and I'm not sure about your specific use case enough to know if this fits, but there it is.

[Marisa the Magician]

Well my specific use case is more about UI drawing (where one could fall back to something else if shaders aren't available)

[Rachael]

Seeing as how users can get annoying with "warning messages" I really would rather just let the engine handle the warning and leave it at that.

Also, seeing as how GZDoom will in the sooner-than-distant-future be requiring OpenGL 3.3 (which has user shader support) and that software mode will be getting shaders anyhow, this will not even be needed in the long run.

[Marisa the Magician]

and that software mode will be getting shaders anyhow

I was waiting for an official confirmation of this.

[Rachael]

I know it's been planned - I think it would reduce a lot of code duplication if at least several of the "software" and OpenGL-specific shaders were merged together, anyhow. IMO it should all go through a single shader path.