Not able to Set a Shader Parameter

Hey guys, I’ve been messing around with glsl bloom and greyscale.
I’m able to get both to work. I can toggle them on which is great.
I want to fade in the greyscale, though, not just toggle it on. I’ve tried for a while today to do SetShaderParameter but it’s just not working.
My use case is fading this in (from full color to full monochrome) and back out in-game.

Below is my xml which is bloom, an unused pixellation effect, and greyscale mashed together. Like I said, it works fine toggling on and off the Grey tag via:

effectRenderPath:SetEnabled("Grey", true)

But this requires the values (swapping rgb for intensity) to be preset in the GreyScale.glsl file. I need to change those values during gameplay.

BloomGreyScale.xml

<renderpath>
	<rendertarget name="buffer" sizedivisor="1 1" filter="false"/> 
    <command type="clear" color="fog" depth="1.0" stencil="0" output="buffer"/>
    <command type="scenepass" pass="base" vertexlights="true" metadata="base" output="buffer" />
    <command type="forwardlights" pass="light" output="buffer" />
    <command type="scenepass" pass="postopaque" output="buffer" />
    <command type="scenepass" pass="alpha" vertexlights="true" sort="backtofront" metadata="alpha" output="buffer" />
    <command type="scenepass" pass="postalpha" sort="backtofront" output="buffer" />
	<command type="quad" tag="Grey" vs="CopyFramebuffer" ps="GreyScale" output="viewport">
		<parameter name="Greyness" value="1 1 1" />
		<texture unit="diffuse" name="buffer" />
	</command>
	    <rendertarget name="blurv" tag="Bloom" sizedivisor="6 6" format="rgb" filter="true" />
    <rendertarget name="blurh" tag="Bloom" sizedivisor="6 6" format="rgb" filter="true" />
    <command type="quad" tag="Bloom" vs="Bloom" ps="Bloom" psdefines="BRIGHT" output="blurv">
        <parameter name="BloomThreshold" value="0.3" />
        <texture unit="diffuse" name="viewport" />
    </command>
    <command type="quad" tag="Bloom" vs="Bloom" ps="Bloom" psdefines="BLURH" output="blurh">
        <texture unit="diffuse" name="blurv" />
    </command>
    <command type="quad" tag="Bloom" vs="Bloom" ps="Bloom" psdefines="BLURV" output="blurv">
        <texture unit="diffuse" name="blurh" />
    </command>
    <command type="quad" tag="Bloom" vs="Bloom" ps="Bloom" psdefines="COMBINE" output="viewport">
        <parameter name="BloomMix" value="1 .5" />
        <texture unit="diffuse" name="viewport" />
        <texture unit="normal" name="blurv" />
    </command>
</renderpath>

I tried modifying the CoreData/Shaders/GreyScale file:

#include "Uniforms.glsl"
#include "Samplers.glsl"
#include "Transform.glsl"
#include "ScreenPos.glsl"
#include "Lighting.glsl"

varying vec2 vScreenPos;

uniform vec3 cGreyness;

void VS()
{
    mat4 modelMatrix = iModelMatrix;
    vec3 worldPos = GetWorldPos(modelMatrix);
    gl_Position = GetClipPos(worldPos);
    vScreenPos = GetScreenPosPreDiv(gl_Position);
}

void PS()
{

    vec3 rgb = texture2D(sDiffMap, vScreenPos).rgb;
    float intensity = GetIntensity(rgb)-cGreyness.x;
    gl_FragColor = vec4(vec3(cGreyness), 1.0);

}

Now, I know the above won’t actually make the intended monochrome effect, it’ll be a flat color on the whole screen. I can do the math (blending the rgb and intensity values together with the ‘greyness’ variable) later. I just need to make sure I can send ‘greyness’ in the first place.

And in game I’ve tried variations of:

effectRenderPath:SetShaderParameter("Greyness",Vector3(1,1,1))

But no matter what I try, floats or vectors, I can’t seem to actually pass the value to the shader. If I set the value in the shader file manually it works, but to blend the monochrome I need to obviously set it live.

If I set cGreyness vec3 in GreyScale.glsl to Vec3(1,1,1) it’ll be flat white, as it should. 0,0,0 would be flat black. However I get a blackscreen no matter what I do with the SetShaderParameter.

Any ideas what it might be?

Does it work when you set arbitrary color in renderpath XML?
If yes, try setting color in XML and setting different color in the code. What happens in this scenario?

try
effectRenderPath:SetShaderParameter("Greyness",Variant(Vector3(1,1,1)))

ahhhh that was it, I’m an idiot. The irony is I have that same Variant syntax elsewhere for materials, just overlooked it. Works perfectly.
Usually if I do something like this, like feeding a vector instead of a quarternion, I’ll get a segfault or an error. In this case I guess the shader just ignored this value since I didn’t get any console messages?

this is the fault of lua wrappers I think. It should work like that but it doesn’t and you get no error. Lua as a whole is sadly neglected in urho3d and has many issues personally I very rarely get answers to many of these. I often have to delve into tolua++ and just diy parts of it.

Have you compiled with safe lua? it may help but produce false errors and you often cant trust the lua part anyway since its a second class citizen as far as urho3d is concerned. kind of sucks

I am not entirely sure what it does if you just pass the vector but I assume it fails to convert it correctly and fails silently. I haven’t had a segfault over a variant before though.

Ah yeah, I have the same issues but fortunately nothing that has stopped my progress too much. I did SafeLua before but have since reinstalled my OS and I forgot to this time around. I just try not to make any mistakes, lol. I don’t recall if safelua helped that much anyway.