How can shader code duplication be reduced in Unity?

Question

In our current Unity project we have a few shaders that are basically just supersets of another shader. For example, we have a shader that performs lighting calculates with diffuse, normal, specular, and gloss maps, and a shader that performs lighting calculations with a diffuse, normal, specular, gloss, and glow map. The first is a subset of the second, but for performance reasons we've decided to separate them. This leaves us with heaps of duplicated code.

On top of this, I need to add stencil buffer operations to some of these materials, which is about 3 lines, but from what I can see, requires the entire shader file to be copied again.

How can we reduce this code duplication? In an object orientated language we'd used inheritence and polymorphism. What can we do here?

Answer 1

You can use #include files in your shader source files, this is described here.

So like this you can regroup any common code into functions, which you put in an include file.