Interesting bit of news that I didn’t see coming:
developer.nvidia.com/cg-toolkit
I kind of did see that comming, but not so soon.
How will this impact Panda? If cg support would be droped then a new shader generator would be needed, two in fact -one for ogl/glsl and one more for dx/hlsl (I for one would not cry at night if direct x would be forgotten somehow).
I think a glsl shader generator is in need anyway - for android support and to get some of the more advanced shaders to work on non-nvidia cards. If a python based solution is ok, then I’m even willing to write something - but with my shader-fu skills I will need help. And there’s also a non-trivial question about the version. The 100 es variant looks like 120 with some extra ‘#defines’, 120 has wide support, it lacks some fireworks from later versions, but it should be good for all the things that the current autoshader can do.
A GLSL-based shader generator has been planned for quite a while now.
Note that Cg no longer being supported or maintained is not an immediate problem; it is a stable piece of software that is likely to continue working for a while. But yes, the long-term focus should be on GLSL (and possibly HLSL, which is not actually very dissimilar from Cg).