Shader Explorer for Xenko

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#1

While digging into Xenko’s shading language XKSL I found the amount of built-in shaders a bit overwhelming and I didn’t really know where to start developing my own shader. To get a better overview, I developed Shader Explorer for Xenko. It is a small tool application which scans the Xenko installation folder for shader source files (*.xksl) and displays all shaders in a tree view, so you can…

  • search for shaders
  • easily see the shader inheritance hierarchy
  • instantly view the shader source code (with rudimentary syntax highlighting)

I thought I’d share it with the community. Maybe it’s useful for someone :slight_smile:

11 Likes
#2

I finally made an account with the forums specifically to thank you for this! I agree the number of shaders is a bit overwhelming to review without a dedicated viewer, windows explorer and notepad++ can only do so much.

1 Like
#3

this is very useful, i am using it all the time while writing shaders. i can imagine this to become a tool shipped with xenko…

#4

I’ve updated the tool to work with the new Xenko version:

1 Like
#5

This looks like a super useful tool. Do you open it up in visual studio or is it a standalone executable?

#6

Thanks for the kind words everyone. It is a standalone executable. Forks and other contributions are very welcome of course, and I finally added a license (MIT) to express that.

2 Likes
#7

@SvenEV nice to hear that you still maintain the repo. i’ve upgraded the tool a bit for latest xenko, i am happy to make a pull request with the latest changes.

#8

new release that works with xenko 3.1 is up: https://github.com/tebjan/Xenko.ShaderExplorer/releases/tag/v1.1.1

2 Likes