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Under review

have the ability to work with graphs for non-destructive workflow

Troy Walker 11 years ago updated by Freya Holmér (Developer) 11 years ago 3
One item that is needed is the ability to have a non-destructive workflow when working on graph/nodes when building a shader network.  I noticed in SSE, you can load networks of previously compiled shaders, allowing you to build incremental versions or variants for other platforms.

This was a nice feature, as I could simply provide a colleague the graph, keeping my "master graph" in-tact along with the compiled shader.  He/She could make a variant allowing iterrative testing, or alternative support.  This allowed allowed for a nice non-destructive workflow when testing new ideas, or when learning something new.

It would require a bit of change in how Shaderforge works, but I think this is really a needed feature.
I'm not sure about this to be honest.
You can easily just ctrl+D a shader in the project view, click "Open in Shader Forge" and you've got a new one to edit!
The advantage with a "destructive" workflow is that the changes are applied immediately. If you crash, the changes will remain, which is pretty nice.

Anyone else have thoughts on this?

(That said, an Undo system would be useful, but that's another topic)
I agree, it is nice to have the changes applied directly.  It looks like the structure is already stored as JSON within the shader.  as a test, I simply copied the contents of the *SF_DATA section you've created to new file, and that worked with a minor compile error... but SF seemed to fix that automagically :)
It's not JSON, it's ALTCSSVS
(Arbitrarily Lumped Together Custom Symbol Separated Value Serialization)