Helpful...any examples when I would have to/can use shaders (besides lighting)?
uh
when you need achieve some special effects?
Wow?
You know, lighting, reflections, blur, color swaping, distortions, etc?
Or something more specific, depends on visual style in your game
This kind of things probably going to be impossible or just hard or just not worth to even try do in other than shader method
Like, as you mention earlier, for example, lighting can be done without using any shader, but then it will be probably not that good as shader, since it may be harder to implement more hard lighting-related effects, such as smooth shadows or something
For example, you can with shader generate in real-time some good looking fire effects
They will be looking good and you will be have opportunity via shader:send change their behavior at runtime
For example, that fire could "react" to wind, change direction and so on
But it will be probably worse for for perfomance, compared to, for example, static fire animation with couple frames
It only depends on what you exactly want and what cons/pros you want to achieve
That's the thing, shader:send won't work because it needs a certain type of variable that I can't use on android's glsl (is it uniform or ...extern?...no...I can't remember, but one variable like that), so I can/have basically get shader code that doesn't use "send" to work.
uh
google for GLES and you will be good