what exactly is a shader anyway?
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this is a serious question by the way, I want to know what makes a shader a shader and all that stuff
@emanate what differentiates it from an ordinary function? And we've heard the term applied to code that has nothing whatsoever to do with graphics, too
@Felthry I honestly don't know, there. :-/
@Felthry Oh, okay I thought you were just throwing shader. :-P
(For serious though, a 'shader' is just a set of code that tells a 3D rendering engine how to display the pixels, I believe. It involves how the lighting works, what sort of fade-into-atmosphere effects happen, even how the geometry of the world is displayed (such as fisheye lens-style, field of vision, or even perceptual curvature of the plane around you.) )