It is an excellent tool for not only creating and tweaking shaders; it is also useful for quickly seeing how your textures and shaders look on your models; great for testing multi-staged textures and blend modes.
There are some sample projects which include normal maps, bump bone (bone scaling) and reflection. There are also commands for environmental effects such as cube mapping. Being able to adjust shader settings using sliders and textboxes; and auto generated text fields for any activated shader file variable is great way to see how different settings work. It updates the preview window as you tweak settings, and as you compile new HLSL code.
It is a bit laggy on my machine, particularly when the window is not focused. It could do with more sample projects; and the shader text editor could do with standard editing facilities such as search & replace and a more comphrehensive set of code editing tools on the tool bar and in the context menu; but all in all, it is one of the tools I purchased that gets well used. Particularly when testing your shaders prior to putting them into your game.
The NVidea FX Composer tool has much more features for shader creation but it is laggy and too many of the NVidea shaders do not work with the DarkBasic/GDK engine.
