can a glsl script be distributed in a compiled form? Or should the source be distributed? How does one protect the source for an glsl script if it cannot be distributed in a compiled form?

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http://3das.noeska.com - create adventure games without programming

i don't think you can store it in compiled form. you could however use a few measures to ensure no one steals it(or atleast making it a bit harder..). you could when you write the file xor each character with a constant integer. this would produce something unreadable. then you could shift the characters around. you could eventually store the file backwards after that or something weird like that

i'm just using the xor trick for my shader files

i got a content-managing system in my actual engine wich is used for every external file that is used by the game. it stores all needed files in a archiv encodes it with some "simple" algorithms like described by JSoftware and pack(compresses) it then internally by using the z-lib library. that makes my glsl-files unreadable in the first place and compact too, wich is kind a cool by-product.

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you could ofcourse also just save it in binary form(eg blockwrite, blockread)

as far as i know if u want to have a shader saved in binary form you have to convert the ascii-version one wrote to binary.Taht wld make a converter-program essential and from writing an own converter it is just near to build in some simple encoding or like in my case also compression.

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oh i see.. forgot each char was a byte in one moment of coffee extase.. please, op, don't read my last post!

If somebody wants to steal your shader code, all you have to do is to use NVEmulate and enable "Write Program Source" to write the shader code into a text file in the current directory.

does that work with every glsl shader ? even the ones used in real games ? does it output glsl or assembler ? i didn't knew that before... ;(

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It outputs glsl, the compiled ARB** programs and the infolog. It is enabled in the driver so it should work with all games.

Whatever you do to hide GLSL shaders is pretty useless. Those people that want to see them have a variety of tools and possibilites. As Lars pointed out, there is this easy way of doing it on NVidia cards, but there are also tools like glIntercept or gDebugger, or one could easily write it's own wrapper OpenGL.DLL to save the shaders to a file.

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www.SaschaWillems.de | GitHub | Twitter | GPU Datenbanken (Vulkan, GL, GLES)

Sorry to kick an old topic but i found an easy way of getting from glsl (and hlsl (directx shaders) and renderman shaders) to arb vertex and fragment shaders:
http://ati.amd.com/developer/ashli.html
This does just wat i want and as a bonus i get to test and merge the shaders also.

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http://3das.noeska.com - create adventure games without programming