Editing shaders

Shaders are written in SDSL which is a superset of HLSL.

vvvv does not come with a built-in shader editor. Instead you can use any text editor of your choice. Simply associate the file-ending .sdsl with it. If you now Rightclick -> Open on a shader node, the code will open in the specified editor. Whenever you save the file, the shader node will be updated.

Syntax Highlighting

For syntax highlighting you have to use an editor that supports HLSL syntax highlighting. Try one of these:

• Visual Studio Code is a light version of Visual Studio. Add the Shader languages support for VS Code extension, assign *.sdsl files to HLSL syntax, and you get syntax highlighting and basic code completion.
• You can also use the Sublime editor with the "HLSL Syntax" package.

Error Reporting

For serious shader coding you'll not want to miss error reporting. This requires

• Visual Studio 2022
• The Stride extension for Visual Studio, which comes with the Stride installer
• Stride itself must also be installed for this to work. To see which exact version of Stride is required for your vvvv version, check the "About" dialog in vvvv

Additional recommendations

• Stride Shader Explorer: A tool that lets you explore the built-in shaders and their inheritance hierarchy
• Enable the scroll bar code map in Visual Studio
• Productivity Power Tools for highlighting the selected word

This setup will give you the best shader editing experience, including syntax highlighting, code completion, code navigation and error reporting.