Compiling Shaders in Visual Studio. Trevor Hammock

Transcription

1 Compiling Shaders in Visual Studio Trevor Hammock

2 Custom Build Tool - Introduction In Visual Studio, after you have added the source file to the project, you can change the item type Visual Studio uses this to determine how a source file is compiled/processed in a build process As of right now it only supports HLSL shaders However there is a Custom Build Tool option where you can specify how unique files can get compiled

3 Custom Build Tool - Setup First add your GLSL source file to your project To do this just right click on the project in the Solution Explorer Next hover over Add and click on Existing Item A File Explorer window will pop up which will allow you to add a GLSL to the project If it was successful then the source file will appear in the Solution Explorer

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5 Custom Build Tool - Setup Once the source file has been added to the project. We need to enable it as part of the build process To do this right click on the source file in Solution Explorer and click on Properties A window will pop-up with 3 properties Exclude From Build : a yes or no value if you want to include this file in the build process Content : a yes or no value if the file is deployable (you can ignore this) Item Type : you can specify what type of item the file is. Visual Studio uses this to determine how the file gets compiled/processed. Here we will need to use the Custom Build Tool Once you are done hit apply to submit your changes

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8 Custom Build Tool - Setup Once you have enabled the Custom Build Tool you can now specify how it gets compiled If you go back to the properties page then a new item on the left will show up called Custom Build Tool. Click on that. There will be a bunch of options: Command Line : this is the CMD/Batch command that will process your item Description : a description of what this does. Shows up in the build output Outputs : the output files that the build process generates Additional Dependencies : can specify additional input files for the build tool

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11 Custom Build Tool - Pros/Cons Pros Compiles you GLSL shader files Cons Need to do this for every GLSL file you have Basically have to write a custom build command for every shader you have Need to use Batch Needs Macros and well formed file paths in order to work properly Need to redo this is if you rename a shader file Ideally want advanced commands so shader files do not get re-compiled

12 Post Build Event Visual Studio allows you to specify pre and post build events in your build process This allows you to run additional scripts that can be run during different stages in the build process We can use this to run a command that will automatically compile ALL of our shader files

13 Post Build Event - Setup First enable the Post Build Event for your project In the Solution Explorer right click on your project and click on Properties The properties window for the project should show up. Now in the left menu under Configuration Properties goto Build Events. Under that there should be an item called Post-Build Event

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17 Post Build Event - Setup From within the Post Build Event menu we can enable this feature and tell Visual Studio how to compile our shader files There will be 3 options in this menu: Command Line : the CMD/Batch command that will be run for this event. By default starts in your project directory Description : a description of this build event Use In Build : a yes or no value if you want to enable this feature

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19 Post Build Event - Script Here is a handy batch command that you can use to compile all of your GLSL shader files: for %%f in (*.vert *.tesc *.tese *.geom *.frag *.comp) do glslangvalidator -V %%f -o %%~nf.spv One thing to note is that this command will always re-compile your shader files, even if there are no changes

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23 Post Build Event - Pros/Cons Pros Can automatically compile all of your shader files in your project directory Do not need to add each one by hand into the project Can easily update your command which will get applied to all of your source files Not as reliant on Macros or well formed file paths as the Custom Build Tool Cons Due to the simplicity of the command, it always re-compiles your shader files Uses CMD/Batch to execute your commands Probably needs a dedicated build script for more advanced build processing