fragment-shader
A lightweight & highly performant WebGL fragment shader renderer written in TypeScript.
- Smaller than
3kb
. - Phenomal performance characteristics, both in rendering speed and in memory consumption.
- Extremely minimal taxing of the garbage collector.
- Certified jank-free – if your experience differs, please let me know!
- Zero-configuration instantiation (see
Hello World
section for details on all default behaviors.
Installation ( NPM )
npm install --save fragment-shader
Hello World ( Default / Bare Bones Implementation )
Note: there are several plugins in modern IDEs (VSCode, etc.) that enable GLSL (shader language) syntax highlighting within template literals by prefacing them with /*glsl*/
– doesn't seem to work on GitHub though.
import { Shader } from 'fragment-shader';
const glsl = `
void main () {
gl_FragColor = vec4(.8, .2, .7, 1.);
}
`;
const shader = new Shader(glsl);
The above code example instantiates an instance of the Shader
class and passes it but a single paramter: a string
containing your fragment shader code. By default, the Shader
class will instantiate a <canvas>
element and append it directly to the <body>
. The <canvas>
will then be sized to match the size of the browser window (and the display's pixel density). Given the default configuration value of fillViewport
being true
, An event listener is then created for the resize
event on the browser window, allowing the renderer and its <canvas>
to resize according to the browser window changing size or orientation. Then, after bootstrapping a webgl2
rendering context, it prepares all internals (including compiling your shader) before finally initializing an internal requestAnimationFrame
loop, syncing the rendering animation to the native refresh rate of the display. There are two methods on the shader instance for controlling rendering playback:
shader.stop();
shader.start();
Configured Implementation
If you wish for the renderer to behave differently than its default configuration, you can do so by passing the constructor a configuration object.
import { Shader } from 'fragment-shader';
const config: ShaderConfig = {
shader: `
void main () {
gl_FragColor = vec4(.8, .2, .7, 1.);
}
`,
target: document.body,
uniforms: [],
width: 800,
height: 600,
dpr: window.devicePixelRatio,
fillViewport: false,
onSuccess: () => {},
onError: () => {},
animate: false,
debug: false,
};
const shader = new Shader(config);
Or, if you become accustomed to the shader being the first argument of the constructor, you can instantiate this way:
import { Shader } from 'fragment-shader';
const config: ShaderConfig = { ... }
const shader = new Shader( `
void main () {
gl_FragColor = vec4(.8, .2, .7, 1.);
}
`, config);
Note If you set animate
to false
, the shader will render its initial frame, but from thereon out you will be responsible for calling the tick()
method on the Shader if you wish to update it – for example, within a requestAnimationFrame
loop.
import { Shader } from 'fragment-shader';
const shader = new Shader(
`
void main () {
gl_FragColor = vec4(.8, .2, .7, 1.);
}
`,
{ animate: false }
);
const tick = (now: DOMHighResTimeStamp) => {
requestAnimationFrame(tick);
shader.tick(now);
};
requestAnimationFrame(tick);