Hiding/Showing entity on EntityVisible

[Laurens]

Hi,

 

My feature request is based on a problem I had in this thread: http://leadwerks.com/werkspace/index.php?/topic/2154-solved-visibility-test/

 

Basically I was unable to perform an EntityVisible test properly because the actual entities were obstructing the view to one another because of the fact EntityVisible really just calls PointVisible with the two entities positions.

 

For PointVisible I can understand this behaviour. However for EntityVisible it would make more sense having the engine hide and show the entities before and after the test so that I do not have to do so myself. It would have saved me a lot of confusion and probably others to

 

Cheers!

[Masterxilo]

Really? Yeah, it should do that itself then.

[Josh]

Shouldn't you hide one or either entity, if they are a mesh? There may be situations where you actually want a mesh to block its own center. I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I want to think over it before making a design change like that.

[ZioRed]

If you will go to accept this request, I would suggest to add an optional parameter to auto-show/hide the entities with "false" as default value, just to avoid invalidating any previous code. However I think that the case of a mesh blocking the visibility of its entity falls more in the field of game design than engine logic.

[Laurens]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding how EntityVisible works. If either center is blocked by the mesh itself, won't the test simply always fail (not visible)?

[Rick]

Technically, this is an entity test, and not all entities are blocking. It could be a pivot, which doesn't have any blocking thing. Could be a light source, or other non blocking entities.

[Laurens]

I see now. Well in that case it should indeed remain as it is. Or perhaps as ZioRed suggested, a new parameter hideEntity that defaults to false.

 

Thanks!