For node, both UDK and (discontinued) ShaderFX are you options honestly, Strumpy (discontinued but Open Source now) is pretty limited in many ways, there is also C4Engine and it's pretty similar to UDK. In terms of compatibility in applications on a large scale, good old code writing in text is pretty much it. After that,…
Should be able to dodot(lightDir,s.Normal)*0.5+0.5 I recommend you just jump straight in to writing the surface shaders in code, you seen to understand enough about shaders in general to do so. By default it's all just straight up CG code (which is close enough to HLSL that they're interchangeable 99% of the time). Just…
What's the best shader editor available ATM? It doesn't necessarily have to be in Unity. It also doesn't have to be node-based, although that would be a huge plus for me.