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Shader Intellisense / Code completion
Hey all,
I use Visual Studio for all my C# scripting, and comfortable as I am, I've grown totally accustomed to the luxury of its intellisense support telling me exactly what's available and what exactly is in scope at any given time, as well as its code-completion. But I recently started studying shader programming, and Visual Studio has no idea what a .shader-file is, so it has no syntax highlighting - it's not even indenting lines after a "{". So now I'm back to playing "Where's Waldo" with compile-time errors whenever I slightly mistyped a variable name again. It's really a "back to the stone age"-experience. I miss having someone hold my hand, damn it! :P
Is anyone aware of a way to get intellisense support for Cg in Visual Studio? Or if that's not possible, perhaps another editor I can run on the side? I just need something that knows what's up and down in Cg as I type. For instance, I'd like to know exactly what is in unitycg.cginc. I understand it defines things like input structs and provides access to stuff like the ModelViewProjection-matrix, but I'd like to see its complete contents. It doesn't seem very well documented.
I searched around and found the Strumpy editor, but that isn't what I'm looking for. I understand shader-code just fine, so a visual drag'n'drop editor that hides it from me is not the goal.
Answer by CHPedersen · Sep 14, 2012 at 07:47 AM
Since no one else seems to have an answer for this one, I'm going to go ahead and link to this website:
This is a plugin for Unity/Visual Studio which attached Unity's process to Visual Studio's debugger, so you can debug your Unity app in Visual Studio. I think it looks extremely promising. But the part that's related to this question is the topic on the roadmap page I linked to - it says they're going to implement code completion and code coloration for shaders, effectively offering precisely what I asked for in this question.
So, for those of you who write ShaderLab/Cg code and are in dire need of a proper editor for it like myself, look out for this feature. I think I've convinced my boss to purchase a license for us. ;)
I'm looking forward to this! Has there ever been a code completion solution for shader languages?
In the interim, at least you can do this: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/108995-Tutorial-How-to-use-NShader-with-Unity-shaders
Answer by Pensun · Apr 04, 2013 at 09:11 PM
I'm looking forward to this! Has there ever been a code completion solution for shader languages?
In the interim, at least you can do this: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/108995-Tutorial-How-to-use-NShader-with-Unity-shaders
For everyone who is still looking this up, a tool is released which auto-completes .shader, .cginc and .compute files in Visual Studio 2013 https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/ed812631-a7d3-4ca3-9f84-7efb240c7bb5