Chapter 8. Introducing Shaders

Congratulations on making it this far! The last two chapters will somewhat stand out from the rest of the book, as we will take a completely different perspective on Kivy and dive into low-level details of the OpenGL renderer, such as the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL). This will allow us to write high-performance code with very little overhead.

Starting from an unscientific introduction to OpenGL, we will proceed to writing a fast sprite-based engine for a starfield demonstration (basically, a screensaver) and finally, a shoot-em-up game (commonly abbreviated as just shmup). The code from this chapter will serve as a basis for the next one, unlike other projects in this book that were largely self-contained. We will lay the foundation here and then build upon it in the next chapter, turning a technical demo into a playable game.

This chapter attempts to cover many complex topics with a sufficient level of detail, but it is way too short to serve as...