Hi everybody, I am trying to work a modding system into Armory and I'm in need of a way to load shaders dynamically from mods.

The way Kha games normally load shaders, as far as I understand, is:

• The Shaders in the project are located by Khamake.
• Khamake writes out a files.json file with references to all of the compiled shaders, which are stored in a <target>-resources directory.
• The kha.internal.ShadersBuilder.build() macro is used to build the kha.Shaders class and provide a field in that class for every shader found by Khamake.

This workflow hardcodes the shaders available to the game at build-time, which is fine for most circumstances, but not if I need to dynamically load mods.

I found this function in the FragmentShader class and I was wondering if this would let me load a shader at runtime, but it has a warning about the function not being portable.

My Questions:

• Does anybody know what "not portable" means exactly?
• Would it work if I loaded the Shader data blob at runtime from a file and created a FragmentShader instance with the fromSource function?
• Are there any better ways to do this that I am not aware of?

Kha/Graphics4/FragmentShader.hx:

/**
    Beware: This function is not portable.
**/
public static function fromSource(source: String): FragmentShader;

Not portable means you have to put in the shaders in whatever format the target expects. You can circumvent that on most targets by linking krafix as a library which then automatically kicks in when fromSource is called but some targets (mostly consoles) disallow compiling shaders at runtime.

@robert Thanks! That will be perfect. I am only planning on targeting Krom at the moment and I am going to be compiling the shaders ahead of time for it, but what is the difference between using FragmentShader.fromSource(source:String) and new FragmentShader(sources:Array<Blob>, Files:Array<String>) to get a FragmentShader instance?

The constructor is for internal use only, please do not use it, it'll fail in mysterious ways if it is not provided with the exact parameters expected by the backend.