
Show HN: ShaderLab – My WebGL Social Network - mgzme
https://shaderlab.mgz.me/
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mgzme
Thank you all so much for the feedback. I really appreciate your time. I still
have to publish a lot of usage documentation on the website, but I'd like to
inform an important feature through this thread: If you press F9 with the
editor focused, you put the editor on VIM mode, so you can work with features
like regexp find and replace for example. The vim mode will, in a near future,
to be toggled trough a toggle switch in the UI.

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johnday
Very cool. It does something weird to my back button though - I had to use the
tab history to get back to HN.

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mgzme
I'm already aware of the unfortunate problem with the history behavior and it
is on top of my priority fixes to do right away. Thank you so much for the
feedback, I really appreciate it.

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cfcosta
I don’t know a thing about WebGL, but this is really neat, and the visuals are
really fun. Great work!

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mbroncano
I love how the code font is really crisp even on top of the visuals. Excellent
work!

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mgzme
Thank you so much. I really appreciate the feedback. It is on my to do list to
make a selector available with a set of syntax highlighting color-schemes so
the user can customize the editor. Besides that, I tried to be as neutral as
possible on the whole UI identity and colors (or lack of them) trying not to
steal attention from the shader being edited.

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appleflaxen
why do you call it a "social network"? Is it really one? (I see likes, etc.
should it be?

when I see that phrase, my interest level goes down a lot... you may be better
off without it.

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mgzme
You may be right. I'd like to receive more opinions like yours concerning how
to define it better. It's absolutely not "just an editor" as per its comments
and likes features. I'm also developing right now a Follow/Unfollow and a
TimeLine mode, in which you will be able to follow users with impressive work
on the platform, and you'll have access to a separate Shader Gallery composed
by all the shaders published by the users you follow (sort by creation date-
time). So yes, it counts with some social network features. But maybe it is in
fact an overstatement to classify it as a social network. I'm totally open to
suggestions from the community, and I thank you for questioning it. I really
appreciate all the criticism and feedback.

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gummyworm
Sounds _exactly_ like Shadertoy. Is this different somehow?

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mgzme
Indeed it is similar to Shadertoy (or any other live GLSL editor like, for
example, the live editor from The Book of Shaders (
[https://thebookofshaders.com/](https://thebookofshaders.com/) \- which I
really recommend, VERY good source for learning, helped me a lot! ), but I
wanted to have a set of more flexible features to fit my personal usage like,
for example, using any external images (from imgur or any other website that
allows cross-domain access) as sampler2D-uniform texture inputs, or using my
own MP3 files to be FFT analysed and produce audio-reactive shaders with more
combinations of frequency bands and averages available, the resolution
selector, export to GIF, etc. I still have to document and publish all the set
of uniforms available and provide an usage guide to make all the features more
clear. There's already some incredibly great live GLSL editors around, all of
them with their bright features (and the lack of some good ones). My intention
was not to produce a clone, but to contribute with a different set of tools to
the same purpose.

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cmyr
This is a slight derail, so apologies, but: I've been just starting to get
interested in shaders, and have been spending time reading things on shadertoy
and working through BoS. Something I find really annoying about shadertoy is
the pretty ubiquitous focus on minimizing code size, which I can understand in
the context of demoscene, but which is super annoying when you're trying to
read something to understand it.

What I'd love to see is something like an 'annotated shadertoy', which
encourages inline documentation and explanation of the various moving parts.
If anything like this exists, I'd love to hear about it!

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ttoinou
Some shaders author are really good at commenting their code. Shane for
example. And top quality shaders on top of that
[https://www.shadertoy.com/user/Shane](https://www.shadertoy.com/user/Shane)

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mgzme
There are countless insanely talented creators at ShaderToy. Shane, IQ and
FabriceNeyret for example. I try to learn from their code as much as I can,
but I still don't even scratch the surface of their talent. Those guys
creations are an inspiration, and I can only hope to learn a fraction of
everything they share with the community.

