I've just wondering how to bundle my GLSL shader source files (for OpenGL ES(iOs)/OpenGL with GLUT (Mac/Windows)) with my application. As pure text files, they would be easily changeable by every user of my software and I'm afraid of undefined behavior... On iOS I simply use XCodes "Copy Bundle Ressources" for my shaders (and retrieve them then from the Application Bundle) - is there a similiar possibility with Visual Studio?
Or ist there even a better cross plattform way, to do so?
GLSL shaders are pure text files (or text snippets, whatever way you want to look at it). There is no way (apart from digitally signing your shaders and refusing to run if the signature does not match) to prevent a user from trivially modifying your shaders in a text editor. (Of course you could make them kind of unreadable by rot13-encoding them or by putting them all into a .zip file and renaming the .zip file to something else, this will not prevent someone determined to find your shaders from doing so, but it will probably deter 90% of the average users.)
But then again, if people do edit your shaders and that results in undefined behaviour... bad luck for them. You know, there is a certain faction of people who feels urged to edit everything that is human readable and editable. Fine, it's their problem if they break their install. You can't prevent people from being stupid.
There is the shader binary extension on recent versions of OpenGL, but it is not intended to be used in a way that would solve your problem. It is merely intended as a caching mechanism to speed up compile/link times on subsequent runs. It is not suited to distribute "shader binaries".
