Engine Rendering pipeline : Making shaders generic

Question

I am trying to make a 2D game engine using OpenGL ES 2.0 (iOS for now). I\'ve written Application layer in Objective C and a separate self contained RendererGLES20 in C++. No GL

Answer 1

The whole point of shaders is to be specific. Generic APIs and inflation of the state machine poisoned OpenGL for a long time (just look at the OpenGL-1.5 glTexEnv). The whole point of modern OpenGL (v3 and beyond) was to get rid of this genericity, so that shaders could be tailored for the task at hand with easy. Don't think shaders to be something separate from the renderer code that uses them. In fact shaders and client side renderer code are complementary and are usually developed in unison.