Featires of your dream 3d engine?

BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/Featires of your dream 3d engine?

The whole topic of shaders is totally new to me and probably to a lot of other people. All I know is that they are a certain program that somehow gets run by pieces of the pipeline on the GPU, to do special stuff on a per-pixel or whatever basis, for lighting or special shading, cartoon effect, etc.

To access that it would be great if it could somehow be easy to create/program a shader without having to use some external app or complicated extra instruction set. A simplified instruction set would be nice. You could have some pre-set shaders or have it so that certain variable are adjustable from within your app.