First Shadertoy

Graphics programming always seemed like the magic dark side of game programming to me. It was a must to learn it in the 90’s to make a decent game, but thanks to Unity and other game engines you no longer need to know the details. Still, it is very cool to understand and code some shaders, isn’t it? I wanted to give it a try. I understood some of the theory behind it, and to get my hands on quickly, I tried one of the browser shader tools, Shadertoy.

I made the good old plasma effect with it:

But I realized trial and error is not the path to learn GLSL. Better to learn it with some OpenGL background, since with modern OpenGL you have to write some shaders to display anything at all. So I found this, this and this to check out. Let’s see what will happen ;)