Shader - hpgDesigns/hpgdesigns-dev.io GitHub Wiki

A shader is very similar to a script but with a unique purpose. There is a lot of history behind modern computer graphics and graphics cards. But the long story short is that your graphics card used to be able to do all of the drawing your game would ever need to do including texturing, blending, fog, filtering, lighting, etc. Hardware manufacturers and game developers realized this was problematic because the graphics card maker had to always provide everything the game developer would want and it also required more effort on the part of the hardware manufacturers. The technical term for this is the fixed-function pipeline and it has largely been antiquated and fallen out of use in favor of shaders.

Shaders basically allow us to program exactly how the graphics card takes our graphics primitives like points, lines, and quads and combines them with other data like that in textures to actually draw an object. There are also several different kinds of shaders, but the most common ones are the vertex shader and the fragment shader.