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Translation notice

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Regarding the follow-up arrangements of the shader tutorial series

The difficulty of Minecraft's shader tutorial is actually just studying the characteristics of its rendering pipeline. Although Mojang provides vanilla developers with ways to modify shaders, it does not disclose the details of the rendering pipeline, and many changes are not written in the change log. This makes it very difficult to introduce pipeline features carefully, and the content may be changed by Mojang as soon as it is written.

Therefore, in order to convey more stable and general knowledge, the main tasks of the tutorial series are divided into the following categories:

  1. The basic process of programmable shader: basically the knowledge common to any 3D game
  2. The structure of the Minecraft pipeline: core shader and post-processing shader
  3. Graphics topics: color, sampling, signals, image processing, non-photorealistic rendering, photorealistic rendering, etc.
  4. GLSL coding knowledge: GLSL syntax, built-in variables, samplers
  5. Vanilla mod development trick: black technology that has to be adopted because the pipeline freedom does not meet the requirements

Readers who have gone through the baptism of the "Basic Process" article should have felt that the introductory shader - or graphics - is more hard-core than the introductory data pack. But on the other hand, many techniques are really difficult to write in a separate article but are very critical. At present, I can only spread them into various chapters and introduce the use of these techniques through some more systematic topics.

The current series of tutorials is mainly divided into three sections:

  • Shader Basics: Mainly introduces the characteristics of the vanilla pipeline or the basic skills needed to develop Minecraft shaders.

  • Shader Practice: Introduce the process of problem analysis and code implementation through some topics or examples, and discover various pipeline limitations in the process and bypass them through various techniques.

  • shader Advanced: Mainly involves in-depth topics in graphics and technical reserves for making vanilla light and shadow.

Therefore, even if some topics seem irrelevant to the function you want to do, I still recommend reading these articles.

In addition, you are welcome to point out any formatting issues, content issues, etc. in the article through Feature comments, Github Issues, or QQ group 619554614. We also look forward to more collaborators who are willing to maintain different versions of pipeline data and review source code.

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