OpenGL Shader Class

This class wraps the GLSL shading language capability promoted to the OpenGL core w/ Version 2.0. It is intended as a shader development tool, not necessarily a high-performance implementation you'd want to use in production code. An example is the Uniformnv set of methods. These take a friendly string name for the uniform variable, call glGetUniformLocationARB, followed by the appropriate glUniformxxARB call. It would make more sense from a performance standpoint for the application to query the location of the uniform variables once during the program's active session and store then re-use the result, as opposed to the repeatedly calling glGetUniformLocationARB. Still, when using this as a shader development tool, the convenience of using string names for the variables is hard to argue with.

This class performs the shader extension API initialization internally when one of the CreateShaderFromxxx or InitializeFromxxx methods are called, making it directly dependent on the GL Extensions module. It also incorporates an adaptation of the 3D Perlin noise function from the OpenGL Shading Language Manual by Randi Rost. This requires the use of the multitexturing extension API, which is also internally initialized by the shader class. The public interface is documented below.