Yet Another Live Coding Tool

A glsl live coding tool strongly inspired by Shadertoy, but as a cross platform cross graphics API desktop application. Code in modern GLSL and view your shaders using the (almost) full power of your computer's graphics APIs.

Why? Because I wanted to train on Veldrid, I love live coding despite not contributing a lot to it, and Shadertoy is a really fun thing. There's also a part of me who wants to show that dotnet is fun, not only for Windows and for boring aspnet and big IT service companies. Veldrid helps a lot in this sense.

Credits in this hectic gif:

• "Protean Clouds" by nimitz
• "[TWITCH] Isometric Cages" by Flopine

Table of content

• Features
• Usage
  • Download release
  • Making shaders
  • Shader parameters
  • API Support
  • Running different graphics APIs
  • Building
  • Publishing releases
• Known issues
• Roadmap and contribution
• License
• Credits

Features

• full GLSL v450 fragment shader support
• texture input support
• load/save your shaders or pack them into a zip archive for easier sharing
• import (or at least try to) shadertoy shaders (doesn't support shaders with texture and sound inputs right now)
• supports OpenGL, Vulkan, Direct3D11 and Metal
• supports Windows 10, Linux and MacOS

Usage

Download release

Self-contained releases are provided for the following systems :

• Windows 64bit : Minimum OS version is Windows 7
• Linux 64bit : Most desktop distributions like CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and derivatives
• MacOS 64bit : Minimum OS version is macOS 10.12 Sierra

Check out the latest release page to download it. CI building and other platforms are in the works.

Builds are self-contained and don't require the .Net Core runtime to be installed. Extract files to whatever folder you wish and launch YALCT executable through your file explorer or via CLI for backend switching.

MacOS will require you to allow the app in your system preferences to able to launch directly from the finder. Unless you have a nice graphics card on your mac, don't expect wonderful performances.

Making shaders

Wether you create or load a shader, the entry point is the main() function. Regarding the rest, you are free to declare as many functions as you need, the entire Vulkan flavor GLSL specs should be supported.

Default shader on create :

void main()
{
    float x = gl_FragCoord.x / resolution.x;
    float y = gl_FragCoord.y / resolution.y;
    out_Color = vec4(0,x,y,1);
}

Shader parameters

API Support

This has mostly been tested on Windows 10, but it does run on MacOS High Sierra and Ubuntu 18.04. Some more testing is required.

Running different graphics APIs

By default, YALCT launches with OpenGL (and Metal on MacOS). You can switch to Vulkan or Direct3D11 through cli :

YALCT opengl
YALCT vulkan
YALCT direct3d11

As you can guess, MacOS doesn't get a choice.

Building

This repository uses git lfs.

Requires .Net Core 3.1 SDK for building. Nothing particular about the building process, just go inside the project folder and build/run/publish it how you wish.

Quickstart :

cd YALCT
dotnet run -c Release

Publishing releases

Windows only for now. A powershell script is provided to build all supported x64 platforms in self-contained zip files. You still need the .Net Core SDK as specified in Building. You also need a globally installed 7-zip because the default Windows compression util breaks folder hierarchy on unix systems.

.\publish-all.ps1

You will find all the zip archives in the build/ folder.

Known issues

• Vulkan doesn't like some shaders and can freeze the app on load

Roadmap and contribution

Contributions are welcome, feel free to fork and open PRs. Here are some features that I wish to implement in the future:

• editor with syntax highlight? Might be hard in the current state
• actual working CI ? Github actions artifacts produce bugged executables
• ISF shader import
• Shadertoy/ISF export
• input audio
• more exotic inputs : game controllers, midi, OSC, why not some interaction with OSSIA Score
• server/p2p with viewer mode for multiuser sessions (for comps for instance)
  • should start simple with local rendering by transfering fragment code to the viewer
  • then I'm thinking about webrtc to allow a bit more efficiency with a lot of users
• shadertoy API instead of just opening local files
• on the fly backend changing
• more options like font choosing for UI and editor. We're using dearimgui, might as well exploit its full potential

There's a lot of experimentation going around : getting better at this, trying out new stuff, colaborating with established tools. I have no pretentions of making something to replace your favorite livecoding tool.

Trying to use some semblance of git flow, but not the tool. Main branch is develop, releases are on master, and I do enjoy the feature/ paradigm.

License

Licensed under the MIT License.

Credits

Fonts:

• Open Sans as main UI font
• Fira Code as editor UI font