Long story short : I would recommend it only for learning basic shader writing, but not for working with for game production.


Pro :
- intuitive, nice GUI, node system is good
- lots of functionnalities / possibilities
- high compatibility (platform, hlsl & glsl supported)
- fast & real time shader compilation
- model loading, procedural texture, auto normalmap generation, blurring shader.

Cons
- impossible to work with your own text editor (visual studio or notepad++ for instance)
- text editor is custom and not really good (bad selection behaviour, no "alt-drag" support, lots of bugs, and so on...)
- software is rendered at 60fps constantly, even when unfocused, can be annoying when you're working. It should be rendered when you click / move mouse, when a parameter or everytime when you have a realtime effect (with a pause option). The software juste use all your GPU.
- not really optimised / reactive, when you have too much nodes, the text editor is lagging >_<
- frustating lack of lots of nodes functionnalities : no way to change rendertarget size, can't redraw in the same render target (no scene node), texture cannot gives their sizes to next nodes, lacks of lots of math operations...
- no way to go from one render target to another, quite frustrating to compare color precisely (export to a file isn't fast nor productive, they should be visible and updated in independant windows).
- you cannot choose texture operation export format (blurring and normalmaps are RGBA8).
- software claim PostFX are fully supported, but you cannot resize render targets, which make descent glow impossible (no downscaling).
- only one camera possible.
- devs sometimes don't answer questions, I hope shadertool 2 will solve a lots of these problems (mainly the scene node and RT size).

Long story short : I would recommend it only for learning basic shader writing, but not for working with for game production. Pro : - intuitive, nice GUI, node system is good - lots of functionnalities / possibilities - high compatibility (platform, hlsl & glsl supported) - fast & real time shader compilation - model loading, procedural texture, auto normalmap generation, blurring shader. Cons - impossible to work with your own text editor (visual studio or notepad++ for instance) - text editor is custom and not really good (bad selection behaviour, no "alt-drag" support, lots of bugs, and so on...) - software is rendered at 60fps constantly, even when unfocused, can be annoying when you're working. It should be rendered when you click / move mouse, when a parameter or everytime when you have a realtime effect (with a pause option). The software juste use all your GPU. - not really optimised / reactive, when you have too much nodes, the text editor is lagging >_< - frustating lack of lots of nodes functionnalities : no way to change rendertarget size, can't redraw in the same render target (no scene node), texture cannot gives their sizes to next nodes, lacks of lots of math operations... - no way to go from one render target to another, quite frustrating to compare color precisely (export to a file isn't fast nor productive, they should be visible and updated in independant windows). - you cannot choose texture operation export format (blurring and normalmaps are RGBA8). - software claim PostFX are fully supported, but you cannot resize render targets, which make descent glow impossible (no downscaling). - only one camera possible. - devs sometimes don't answer questions, I hope shadertool 2 will solve a lots of these problems (mainly the scene node and RT size).