Precompiling materials/shaders

[Eideren]

This class forces all materials contained in a build to compile at once instead of doing so in the middle of gameplay whenever they are on screen.

ShaderPrecompiler.zip

Here's how you set it up:

• Create a new scene, call it something like "ShaderPrecompiler"
• Add a single entity to this scene
• Add this component to that entity
• Set the "NextScene" variable of the component you just added to the first scene of your game
• In your game's settings, set the first scene to be the scene you just created
• Fill in the component's variables by looking at how you configured your game's lights
  The last step is essential to get right, if you haven't set it up correctly you would just be wasting your time

Those instructions are also included at the top of the source file in case you might need them.

Increasing the amount for those variables quickly creates too many permutations to compile, keep them to a strict minimum, you can always run this again with different settings if you intend to let the user change graphics settings

Do note that this class doesn't help in pre-compiling materials/shaders you build at runtime, you can either generate them as assets in the editor, or build them at runtime right before running this component and save them to the content manager/file provider

Here's the default UI it builds and shows in game while compiling:

It looks awful, feel free to customize it however you might need by editing the source file above.

And the editor-side configuration:

Haven't tested skinned models yet, let me know if they need to be included in the tool as well.