Shader inheritance

Hello,

is it possible to derive a new shader from an existing shader by just replacing some vertex programs? Some sort of inheritance?

Or do I have to duplicate the entire shader (Unity 5 Standard Shader) and replace all vertex programs accordingly?

I already read the documentation, but couldn't find anything related to inheritance.


Thank you for your help in advance

Greetings Eduard

 

Shaders don't really have inheritance in the OO sense. You have to think of it as C, not C++/C#.

You can use includes to reuse code in multiple shaders. Unity does that and you can add your own includes.

 

Why not just make a regular syntax like cg and make unity-related features (properties, blend, cull, pass) as macros then we could easily override Standard shader with stencil culling support just with few lines of code

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. // our stencil code
3. Properties() {
4.    Color2("Prop Name", fixed4(1,1,1,1));
5. }
6. Stencil(Ref=1, Comp=always, Op=Replace);
7.  
8. Pass() {
9.   // do custom pass
10. }
11.  
12. #include "StandardShader.cginc" // properties block gets merged into the existing one at the top and we get sort of inheritance
13.  

And we easy get a standard shader with custom prepass or something like that

stencil is just an example, because right now I need to reimplement/passthrough standard shader to realize a feature. There are lots of another usecases of such "inheritance"