EDIT : forgot the link to the webpage :/
http://shadermap.com/home/
so ever since AppGameKit presented shaders abilities
we have a good opportunity to show some amazing visuals with AppGameKit in our Games/Apps just like all the Pro Developers in the industry do.
in order to achieve this we not only need Shaders to work in the engine
but we also need the right Textures attached to objects and sprites and now that 3d Physics are enabled I strongly suggest to move from 2d to 3d and if you want something to be built look and feel like a 2d Game you can use 3d Planes , still I don't know if it is faster but you will get much more possibilities both in visuals and code.
so where do we get these extra textures that will just make everything look better ?
first we can learn design , I think that is the first step , cause you can be a very good modeler but with some design training your models and texture will look better.
second we need a way to create Normal Maps , Light Maps , Gloss, Specular, Deformation etc... so how will we do this ?
ShaderMap app. it is not free but it dose not cost too much , 60 $ and you'll get all the Needed textures to achieve a high end product.
here are some videos from the website itself, mostly tutorials, you will see that the App is pretty easy to handle and it is very detailed and focused on target.
after exporting all of those images
you will need to load them with
SetObjectImage(objId,ImgId,stage) and as the document sais you can have up to 8 textures per one objects where the 0 is the diffuse or color or the actual Texture of that objects and from 1 to 7 are the Shader based textures.
you will still need shaders so that these stages will be shown in real time in your app /game , so I guess you can say that this is the first stage where it comes to handling shaders.
PS I'm not the developer of ShaderMap nor an advertiser of it , just want my fellow Forum Knights to be aware that there are some great tools out there, I honestly did not knew about shadermap until today , and there is a way to GET the source code or C++ code (didn't really moved into that section) so it might be possible for the Pros here to create there own Texture generator from the Math that is presented there.
Enjoy
