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Shaders style guide

This style guide lists conventions to write elegant shaders. The goal is to encourage writing clean, readable code and promote consistency across projects, discussions, and tutorials. Hopefully, this will also support the development of auto-formatting tools.

Since the Godot shader language is close to C-style languages and GLSL, this guide is inspired by Godot's own GLSL formatting. You can view an example of a GLSL file in Godot's source code here.

Style guides aren't meant as hard rulebooks. At times, you may not be able to apply some of the guidelines below. When that happens, use your best judgment, and ask fellow developers for insights.

In general, keeping your code consistent in your projects and within your team is more important than following this guide to a tee.

Note

Godot's built-in shader editor uses a lot of these conventions by default. Let it help you.

Here is a complete shader example based on these guidelines:

shader_type canvas_item;
// Screen-space shader to adjust a 2D scene's brightness, contrast
// and saturation. Taken from
// https://github.com/godotengine/godot-demo-projects/blob/master/2d/screen_space_shaders/shaders/BCS.shader

uniform float brightness = 0.8;
uniform float contrast = 1.5;
uniform float saturation = 1.8;

uniform sampler2D screen_texture : hint_screen_texture, repeat_disable, filter_nearest;

void fragment() {
    vec3 c = textureLod(screen_texture, SCREEN_UV, 0.0).rgb;

    c.rgb = mix(vec3(0.0), c.rgb, brightness);
    c.rgb = mix(vec3(0.5), c.rgb, contrast);
    c.rgb = mix(vec3(dot(vec3(1.0), c.rgb) * 0.33333), c.rgb, saturation);

    COLOR.rgb = c;
}

Formatting

Encoding and special characters

• Use line feed (LF) characters to break lines, not CRLF or CR. (editor default)

• Use one line feed character at the end of each file. (editor default)

• Use UTF-8 encoding without a byte order mark. (editor default)

• Use Tabs instead of spaces for indentation. (editor default)

Indentation

Each indent level should be one tab greater than the block containing it.

Good:

void fragment() {