How to make shaders pickup custom enums?

[bjoern]

I want to use custom enums inside a shader. How can I achieve this?

In the chat @tonfilm said:

@tonfilm

the enum C# has to be in the scope of your .vl file that forwards the tfx
so make a C# project, compile it and reference the .dll in the .vl file and then put the shaders in the /shaders folder next to it

I’ve tried this now and it doesn’t seem to work.

Folder structure looks like this:

📂ShaderEnums
 ┣ 📂lib
 ┃ ┗ 📂net6.0
 ┃   ┗ 📜EffectEnums.dll
 ┣ 📂src
 ┃ ┣ 📂EffectEnums
 ┃ ┃ ┣ 📜EffectEnums.cs
 ┃ ┃ ┗ 📜EffectEnums.csproj
 ┃ ┗ 📜EffectEnums.sln
 ┗ 📂vl
   ┣ 📂shaders
   ┃ ┗📜EnumTest_TextureFX.sdsl
   ┗ 📜EnumTrial.vl

The enum is defined like this:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;


namespace VL.Stride.Effects.TextureFX 
{
    public enum SomeColor
    {
        Black,
        White,
        Red,
        Green,
        Blue
    };
 }

And forwarded by EnumTrial.vl.

The shader looks like this:

[TextureSource]
[Category("Source")]
[Summary("For testing custom enum")]
shader EnumTest_TextureFX : TextureFX
{
    [EnumType("VL.Stride.Effects.TextureFX.SomeColor")]
    int Color;

    stage override float4 Shading()
    {
        float4 col = 0;

        switch((uint)Color%3)
        {
            case 0 : col = 0; break;
            case 1 : col = 1; break;
            case 2 : col = float4(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0); break;
        }
        return col;
    }
};

Still the input is of type Int32 in the patch:

---

ShaderEnums.7z (28.4 KB)

[bjoern]

Hey, this is currently a bit of a show stopper. Any feedback would help – even if it is just “sorry doesn’t / won’t work” – so we can decide on an other approach (wrapping shaders in process nodes).

[Elias]

Sorry to say, this apparently never worked for external shaders. The internal type lookup only finds enums defined in VL.Stride. We would need to add an option to guide the system to the dll where the enum is defined.

[Elias]

I’ve opened an issue for it.

[Elias]

Turns out this was working all along by using assembly qualified names. For example

Say our library has an enum MyLib.MyEnum located in lib\net6.0\MyLib.dll, we can use it by appending the assembly name:
EnumType("MyLib.MyEnum, MyLib")]