Shaders have been a part of GameMaker Studio for a while now, having been introduced in 2014. Since their inclusion, I have mostly remained mystified by them, with a vague and cloudy understand of what they are and what they can do, and haven’t used them at all. That will [hopefully] start to change today.

As always, when try I learn something new in programming, I find that writing up what I’ve learned helps me to remember and keep my learning organized. I like to publish my notes so that they can help others, and so that others can find errors and make suggestions for better ways to do things. I’m still very new to working with shaders, so I’m not trying to put myself out there like I’m some kind of expert, but here’s what I’ve been able to learn about using shaders with GameMaker Studio so far:

Shader basics

First, we need to understand what a shader is. A shader is a specialized program that processes graphics. Shaders are executed on the Graphics Processing Unit, or GPU, which is specialized hardware for accelerated graphics processing. Thus, shaders are very fast. As well, since they work on the GPU, using shaders will free up the CPU to do other tasks, which can further help to improve the frame rate of your games.

This sounds like enough of a reason to want to use shaders, doesn’t it? Well, it gets better. The main thing about shaders is that they can do amazing visual effects, which will can make your game look better, but can also play an active role in how the game plays. For example, you could use a shader to handle the graphical processing of a special view mode in the game, such as night vision or x-ray vision. One of my favorite shader-based gameplay mechanics that was centered on the use of shaders was Daniel Linssen’s Birdsong, winner of the “Overall” and “Theme” categories of the Ludum Dare 31 compo held in 2014. The theme of LD31 was “Entire Game in One Screen”, and Linssen’s approach to this was to create a giant one-room game, that was crammed into a single screen(no scrolling), and, using a fish-eye lens effect done with a shader, magnify the area where the player is so that it was large enough and detailed enough to be playable.

There’s virtually no limit to what graphical effects you can come up with using shaders, other than the limits of your imagination and of course your programming and math skills. It also helps to understand how computers work with graphical concepts such as color, pixels, binary math, and so forth. Additionally, scientific knowledge in disciplines like optics can be very useful. Shaders have their own specialized programming language that they are coded in — actually there are several related languages to choose from. Because of this, shaders are considered an advanced topic in programming, and there are numerous hurdles to surmount in order to be able to write them yourself.

That said, shaders are re-usable bits of code, and so one of the first things you can do when you start getting into shaders is to simply use pre-existing shaders that have been written by other people.

Getting Started with Shaders

Before you can use shaders, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with a few concepts.

Shader references

Here’s links to the relevant pages in the GMS manual on using shaders in the context of GameMaker Studio:

GMS1:

Shaders Overview

Shaders GML reference

Shader Constants

Tech Blog Shaders tutorial: 1 2 3 4

GMC Forums shader tutorial.

GMS2:

Shaders Overview

Shader Constants

 

Other shader resources (general)

Language References

The four shader languages that GMS supports are: GLSL ES, HLSL9, HLSL11, and GLSL. Which one you need to learn and use will depend on your target platform, but for this article we’ll focus on GLSL ES, since it supports the most target platforms (all of them, except Windows 8).

GLSL ES language specification

HLSL language specification

I haven’t gotten into the shader languages enough yet to know why you’d ever pick HLSL over GLSL, but presumably there must be some advantage to using HLSL when targeting Windows platforms, either in terms of correctness or performance. Otherwise, I would think you’d be better off just sticking with GLSL ES and be compatible with the most targets.

Tools

Shadertoy Shadertoy is a wonderful website that allows you to play with shader programming, running them in your web browser. Then you can share your shader creations with the community of users of the website, and in turn you can demonstrate and use shaders written by others.

Other graphical concepts in GameMaker, and how they relate to shaders

It’s not a bad idea to review and understand the entire chapter on Drawing in the GameMaker documentation. There are many concepts that you will need a working knowledge of in order to understand how to use drawing to its fullest capacity, and to get things working together smoothly.

But the manual isn’t the end of the story. Often I find that the manual doesn’t go far enough to explain how different concepts work. The sections on blend modes and alpha testing are particularly inadequate by themselves. The manual also doesn’t go very far to demonstrate or suggest how different features and functions can be connected to one another. That’s for the user to infer, and verify through experimentation. This is great if you are creative and love to experiment and discover. On the other hand, there’s so much that has already been figured out and discovered by others, and it would be nice if that was all documented in an easy to search reference somewhere.

Read the entire manual, cover to cover, if you can. Create little demo projects to test your understanding of what you’ve read, and figure out how to do things. Read it again. And refer to it whenever you need to. There’s no substitute for reading and understanding the manual. I’ll still touch briefly on the major concepts here, for summary:

Surfaces

All drawing happens somewhere, and in GameMaker that somewhere is called a surface. Behind the scenes, a surface is simply a chunk of memory that is used to store graphics data. You can think of it as a 2D grid of pixels, stored in the program’s memory, and drawn to the screen only when called for. You can also think of it as virtual “scratch paper” where you do some work “backstage” and then bring it out to use in the game when needed.

The application has an Application Surface, and by default everything is drawn here. But you can create other surfaces, which you can work on, composing a drawing off-screen, until you are ready to draw it to the screen. As you might imagine, there are countless reasons why this is useful, and endless ways to make use of surfaces.

Surfaces are relatively easy to use, but are considered an intermediate level programmer’s tool in GameMaker, for a couple of reasons:

1. Surfaces consume memory, and need to be disposed of when no longer needed.
2. Surfaces are volatile, and can be destroyed without warning, so should not be assumed to exist. For example, if the player switches focus to a different application, or if the computer enters sleep or hibernation mode, or if the game is saved and resumed, surfaces that were in existence at the time the application was last running may have been cleaned up by the operating system, and will need to be re-created if they don’t exist.
3. All drawing must happen in one of the Draw events. If you try to use draw functions in other events, it may or may not work correctly, and this will vary from computer to computer. I once made a game where I did some set-up in the Create Event of an object, where I created a surface, drew to it, and then created a sprite from the surface, and assigned the newly created sprite to the object. It worked fine on my computer, but when other players downloaded my game to try it out, it did unexpected things and the graphics were glitched. Fortunately, I figured out what the problem was, and fixed it by moving this sprite creation into the Draw Event. Once I did this, the game ran correctly on everyone’s computer.

Drawings done to surfaces can be run through a shader, as input, and thereby be processed by the shader. In short, a surface can be the input image data for a shader, and the output of the shader will be the processed version of that surface, transformed by the shader.

Blend Modes

For a long time, long before GMS introduced shaders, GameMaker has provided blend modes. Blend modes affect what happens when GameMaker draws graphics over existing graphics that were drawn previously. Normally, when you draw something, it covers the pixels that were there before. But, by changing blend modes, you can do other things than simply replacing the previous pixels with new pixels, blending the old and the new in different ways according to the mathematical rules of whatever blend mode you had selected.

To be honest, I’m not sure what useful purpose there is for every blend mode. It would be great if there were more tutorials showing useful applications for them, especially the obscure ones that I don’t see used much, if ever.

The most commonly useful blend modes, in my experience, are bm_normal and bm_add. Normal blending is the default drawing mode, and is what you use 99% of the time in most games. Additive blending creates vivid glowing effects, and is particularly lovely when used in conjunction with particle systems to create glowing systems of overlapping particles, especially when you are drawing translucent pixels (using alpha < 1).

Blend modes are also useful for creating clipping masks. For more info on that, there are some good tutorials already written on how to create a clipping mask using surfaces and blend modes.

Some of the first questions I had when Shaders were introduced were: What do we do with blend modes now that we have shaders? Do we still need them? Can we combine them with shaders, somehow? Or do shaders make blend modes obsolete?

Basically, as I understand it, the answer seems to be that blend modes were kind of a limited predecessor to shaders, and enabled GM users to achieve some basic drawing effects simply, without exposing GM users to all that highly technical stuff that shaders involve, that I mentioned above.

Anything you could do with blend modes, can be done with shaders instead, if you wanted to. That said, if all you need is the blend mode, they’re still there, still supported like always, and you can go ahead and use them. They’re still simpler to use, so why not.

One thing to be aware of, though, when using blend modes, every time you change blend mode in GameMaker, you create a new “batch” of drawing. The more batches, the longer GM will take to draw the game each step. Thus, many batches can slow drawing down tremendously. This is an area where you may need to focus on optimization. And if you’re that focused on performance, then it might be worth looking into a shader-based approach instead.

Once you’ve become sufficiently comfortable with shaders, you may not have as much need for using GameMaker’s drawing blend modes.

D3D functions

I have not used GML’s d3d functions, much, either, so my understanding is very limited. Basically, as I understand it, the d3d functions in GameMaker wrap Microsoft’s Direct3D drawing functions, and enable drawing with more sophistication than is possible with the basic GML draw functions such as draw_rectangle, draw_line, draw_ellipse, etc.

Despite the name, the Direct3D functions are useful for 2D drawing as well as for 3D.

This article will not cover using GML’s d3d functions, as we’re focusing on shaders. But as any graphics in your game can be used as input into a shader program, anything you draw using d3d functions can become input for a shader to process.

Particles

Particles are “cheap” (efficient) graphical effects that can be created without having to instantiate an object. They are efficient because they do not incur all the processing overhead that comes with a full-blown object. Huge numbers of particles can be generated at very little cost. These can be used for all sorts of effects, so long as the particles do not need to interact with instances in the game, such as triggering collisions. Typically, particles are used for things like dust clouds, smoke, fire, glowing “energy plasma”, haze, rain, snow, and so on to create additional atmosphere.

To use particles, you have to create a particle system. As with Surfaces, particle systems take memory, and need to be disposed of when no longer needed, in order to free up that memory. Full detail on how to set up and use particle systems is beyond the scope of this article.

Several external utilities have been developed by GameMaker users over the years to make designing, building, previewing, and testing particle systems easier, and these are highly recommended.

In conjunction with shaders, I don’t know that there is any direct interplay between particle graphic effects and shaders, but certainly a shader may be used to further process a region of the room where particles exist, to create more sophisticated effects.

Using Shaders in GameMaker Studio

Right, now that we’ve introduced the concept of what a shader is, and reviewed the other main graphics concepts in GMS, here’s where we get to the heart of how to use shaders in GameMaker.

A shader is a pair of shader-language programs, consisting of: a vertex shader, and a fragment shader. Vertex shaders deal with the edges of the drawn area, while fragment shaders deal with the insides.

Let’s say you want to use a shader program that has already been written, perhaps by someone else. All you need to do is use this code in your draw event:

shader_set(my_shader);
 //draw stuff
shader_reset();

So, it’s a lot like drawing to a Surface. With surfaces, first you set which surface you want to draw to, then you draw, then you reset so that drawing resumes to the application surface. With shaders, you set the shader you want to use, draw the stuff that you want to be transformed by the shader, then reset to normal drawing.

Everything drawn between setting the shader and re-setting back to non-shader drawing will be drawn through the shader program.

Easy enough, right? Well, there’s slightly more to it than that.

Uniforms

“Uniforms” is a strange term at first, and was where shaders started to seem strange to me. This is a term that comes from the shader language itself. The GameMaker manual talks about them in a way that assumes the reader is already familiar with the concept, and doesn’t go into a lot of detail explaining it to newbies.

In essence, “uniforms” are input variables that can optionally be passed into a shader that is designed to use input values. Once you understand what a uniform is, it’s not that difficult a concept. You can read more about them at these pages:

• OpenGL
• The Book of Shaders
• GLSL

The gist of it is, when writing a shader program, when you declare a variable, you can declare it to be a uniform variable, which means that the variable can be accessed from outside the shader, thereby giving the program that calls the shader a way to change the shader’s behavior during execution. To do this, you can’t just refer to the uniform variable by name; you have to get the uniform variable’s memory handle, using shader_get_uniform(nameOfUniformVariable), and then change the value of the variable using shader_set_uniform_f(nameOfUniformVariable, value). Uniforms are actually constants within the shader’s execution scope, so once a value is passed into the shader from the outside and it is set as a uniform, it cannot be changed (the value could be copied to another variable, and that variable could then be modified, though.)

If you’re using a shader that has uniforms that you need to set, it’s done like this:

u_color1 = shader_get_uniform(my_shader, "f_Colour1");
u_color2 = shader_get_uniform(my_shader, "f_Colour2");

shader_set(my_shader);
shader_set_uniform_f(u_color1, 1, 1, 1);
shader_set_uniform_f(u_color2, 1, 0, 0);
//draw stuff
shader_reset();

There are actually a few uniform functions in GML:

• shader_set_uniform_f() sets a floating point uniform value.
• shader_set_uniform_f_array() sets an array of floating point uniform values.
• shader_set_uniform_i() sets an integer uniform value.
• shader_set_uniform_i_array() sets an array of integer uniform values.
• shader_set_uniform_matrix() sets a matrix of values.
• shader _set_uniform_matrix_array() sets an array of matrix values.

Conclusion

That’s about all I know about shaders, for now.

As I get more familiar with using shaders, I’ll update this with more complicated examples, such as (possibly):

• How to use multiple shaders on the same drawing (eg chaining the results of one shader’s transformation of some drawing into the input for a series of shaders).
• Other stuff…

How to write shaders in GLSL, if I ever do it, will be a topic for its own article (or series of articles).