Shader not compiling on mac but will on windows

Questions
#1

I wrote a fragment shader on my windows machine and it worked fine. But when I try to build it on my late 2012 macbook pro i get the following errors.

Incompatible types in initialization (and no available implicit conversion)

Is this a result from the version differences of OpenGL? Is there a way to force to a specific version of OpenGL?

#2

It’s said that apple will drop opengl?

#3

Do you get a line number as well? Did you search for the error? Maybe this will help: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/92158/glsl-incompatible-types-at-initialisation-and-no-available-implicit-conversion

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#4

Yes, that is true, but not for quite some time. We’re working on a Metal compatible render pipeline.

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#5

The shader compiler on mac may be more picky than the one on windows. Please post the log that contains the error, there should be a line number to the offending code.

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#6

One common mistake is assigning an int to a float lvalue in GLSL:

float a = 1.0; // OK
int b = 1; // OK
float c = 1; // Wrong

But yeah, look at the code at the line number reported by the error.

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#7

All my shaders written on a Mac, work on Windows. So Windows is more permissive in your case.

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#8

@britzl
Thank you for the reply it did give me a line number. I dont have my laptop with me this morning but ill post it all latter today.

@Johan_Beck-Noren
Thank you, I will later today.

@dapetcu21
I see. If I remember correctly my code is written correctly as you show it.

#9

@britzl

I was able to revisit this problem and i narrowed the problem down to this issue. ‘+’ does not operate on ‘vec3’ and ‘vec4’. That makes sense, but I don’t get this error on windows. the vec4 is the time variable from the shadertoy tutorial. Any thoughts? thanks for the help.

#10

Different platforms have different shader compilers. Some are more forgiving while some are not as forgiving, which can let a shader run on e.g. Windows but not on MacOS.

Anyway, it sounds strange that any compiler would accept adding a vec3 and vec4. What would the expected resulting type be?

#11

Either vec7 or vec3.5 =P

2 Likes
#12

The resulting type expected would be a vec3. Im not a shader expert by any means. I just ran through the defold tutorial then started to convert some shadertoy examples over to defold to learn from. I guess I expected that the defold shader was platform agnostic. I converted vec4 time to a vec3 and got it to work (sort of) its not an exact match. Thanks for the help, ill keep plugging away at it.

1 Like
#13

Haha sounds about right