Alternative to gl_TexCoord.xy to get texture coordinate - c++

Question

I always did my shaders in glsl 3 (with the #version 330 line) but it's starting to be pretty old, so I recently tried to make a shader in glsl 4, and use it with the SFML library for rendering, instead of pure openGL.
For now, my goal is to do a basic shader for a 2d game, which takes the color of each pixel of a texture and modify them. I always did that with gl_TexCoord[0].xy, but it seems to be depreciated now, so I searched and I heard that I must use the in and out variables with a vertex shader, so I tried.
 
Fragment shader
#version 400
in vec2 fragCoord;
out vec4 fragColor;
uniform sampler2D image;
void main(){
// Get the color
vec4 color = texture( image, fragCoord );
/*
* Do things with the color
*/
// Return the color
fragColor = color;
}
 
Vertex shader
#version 400
in vec3 position;
in vec2 textureCoord;
out vec2 fragCoord;
void main(){
// Set the position of the pixel and vertex (I guess)
fragCoord = textureCoord;
gl_Position = vec4( position, 1.0 );
}
I also seen that we could add the projection, model, and view matrices, but I don't know how to do that with SFML (I don't even think we can), and I don't want to learn some complex things about openGL or SFML just to change some colors on a 2d game, so here is my question:
Is there an easy way to just get the coordinates of the pixel we're working on? Maybe get rid of the vertex shader, or use it without using matrices?

Answer 1

Unless you really want to learn a lot of nasty OpenGl, writing your own shaders just for textures is a little overkill. SFML can handle textures and shaders for you behind the scenes (here is a good article on how to use them) so you don't need to worry about shaders at all. Also note that you can change the color of SFML sprites (which is, I believe, what you are trying to do), with sprite.setColor(sf::color(*whatever*));. Plus, there's no problem in using version 330. That's what I usually use, albeit with in and out stuff as well.
If you really want to use your own shaders for fancy effects, like pixellation, blurring, etc. I can't help you much since I've only ever worked with pure OpenGl, so I don't know how the vertex information is handled by SFML, but this is some interesting example code you can check out, here is a tutorial, and here is a reference.
To more directly answer your question. gl_FragCoord is a built-in variable with GLSL that keeps track of the fragments position, but you have to set gl_Position in the vertex shader. You can't get rid of the vertex shader if you are doing anything OpenGl related. You'd have to do fancy matrix stuff (this is a wonderful library) and probably buffer stuff (like this) to tell GLSL yourself where everything is.