I always wanted to muck around with GPU shaders, without having to write a thousand lines of C++ and other nonsense.
RenderMonkey is the answer. Yay! Now I can start plowing through those GPU Gems books that have been nagging me…
(Yeah, y’all probably knew it already).
Heh, I wrote a web-page-based shader IDE back in the day, using ActiveX:
http://archive.gamedev.net/archive/columns/hardcore/dxshader1/page3.html
Got me a job offer from the DX team.
These days you can do shader development in a modern web browser using WebGL:
http://webglplayground.net/
HLSL is used by XNA, which requires very little boilerplate. And unlike RenderMonkey, it’s still supported.