Just wondering if a material system similar to Leadwerks is planned in Reloaded or not?



In case you don't know what I mean:

In Leadwerks every object (entity) can have multiple surfaces and every surface of the objects (entities) can have it own material and every material can have it own textures, shaders and other properties such as cast shadow or not and you can edit the material using a builtin material editor and finally apply these custom material to different surfaces of the objects.



How is this useful?



For example, let say I want to import a window entity in to Reloaded having 2 surfaces, a glass surface and the frame sutface and

I would like to use a glass shader on the glass surface but not on the frame surface.

Using such feature I could simply just make a material inside Reloaded, add a glass shader, add the glass texture and apply the material on the glass surface of the window entity and get a result something similar to this using a single entity and multiple material using different textures and shaders on the same entity:





At the moment to achieve something similar in Reloaded, the window need to be 2 individual mesh/entity, the frame and the glass. Using such system, the entity can be a single mesh having different surfaces and different materials/shaders/properties applied on different surfaces of the entity.

For Materials in Reloaded we do have an index list I posted it somewhere on the forums sometime ago cant recall where. But all the index really does is define what footfall sound to load, impact sound and what debris to produce from it.



EDIT:

http://fpscrforum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=210199&b=2

Thanks it is really useful but what I really mean under "Material" is to define the actual appearance of the entity not just what footfall sound to play:





As you can see on the screenshot, in Leadwerks you can set different properties, textures and shaders for "materials" and you can apply this material on any surface of an object this way add unique appearance to individual surfaces of the same object/entity.

Such as glass surface of window is reflecting and transparent but the frame surface of window is not reflective and not transparent.





In Leadwerks you can do things like this on a single object using materials.

Yeah what I'm wondering is if they will use the material index list to help define what shader to use. This would indeed be quite helpful with realism. Great idea!

At present, one can easily mix transparencies on a single mesh object with varying levels of opacity using the alpha channel during your mapping process - I frequently employ this simple method for the windows on structure meshes. Reflection - well, I suppose somehow that should be handled the same way, but I'm not quite sure how it would be accomplished. I'm rather certain that the FPSCR engine is capable of doing it simply because the transparency/reflection characteristic is found in the water. Perhaps a clever coder might find this challenge enticing if the proper bribe was available. I'm horrible at coding and if making a decent living was part of my life then preparing such a bribe might be possible. Then again, if making a decent living was part of my world, I wouldn't be messing with this affordable software!