(Sorry for exaggerated thread title. You’re doing a good job Epic 
)
Ever since UE4 was released over two years ago, people have been complaining about the shader extensibility problem. The material editor is very limited and should never have completely replaced HLSL shader coding like it does now. There are too many things it can’t do:
It can’t do new shading models that react to UE4’s lights
It can’t do geometry shaders
It can’t do multi-pass shaders
It can’t do compute shaders
etc, etc…
These are serious problems for anyone who is interested in getting creative with rendering or giving their game its own unique look.
Can we take this opportunity to discuss this issue? Is anything being done to solve this and allow users to simply create new .usf shaders files in-editor? If not, can you share details as to why, or what that would involve? Is there no way to make a material type where you directly write HLSL vertex//pixel shaders and have it generate code into the engine’s various .usf files at all the right places when you press Apply? Or something along those lines…
thanks