Enttity classid

[Alienhead]

Last question for awhile   I'm dipping into stuff I haven't yet messed with in LE and I got stuck.  My question is - is it possible to change an entity's classid?
I'm wanting to classify a few 'models' as 'brushes' to avoid decal over spray.

Thanks.

[Josh]

This is not possible. What are you trying to prevent?

[Alienhead]

28 minutes ago, Josh said:

This is not possible. What are you trying to prevent?

I want decals on terrain and models ( buildings and such ) but not on the player..  player model is classified as a 'model' if I'm correct.

[Josh]

And I take it the buildings are loaded from models? It would be no problem if they were brushes, but otherwise I think it will be hard to prevent them from appearing on the player models. This is because they are rendered in a deferred step, and very little information can be stored about where each pixel came from.

I have no implemented decals in Ultra yet, but they will be part of the lighting system, and since it's a forward renderer it will be easier to handle things like making a decal appear on one specific entity.

[Alienhead]

35 minutes ago, Josh said:

This is not possible. What are you trying to prevent?

 

[Genebris]

I wonder how they make deferred decal in other engines and give very straightforward layers system so you can exactly choose which objects are affected by decals.

[Josh]

That's one possible solution, but it requires an extra texture to be stored with the gbuffer, which would not get used very often. With the forward renderer, we could assign layers, maybe using the existing render layers system, or we could explicitly assign entities the decal will appear on.

[reepblue]

In the shader, you can delete the decal code block and it'll break the decal from working on the material. 

[Genebris]

Wait if that's so simple why not just provide a decalless shader with Leadwerks or have a checkbox in material?

[Josh]

Well, actually the entity type does get stored in the gbuffer as a flag:

	int materialflags=1;
	if (ex_selectionstate>0.0) materialflags += 2;
	if (c==1) materialflags += 4;//brush
	if (decalmode==2) materialflags += 8;//model
	if (decalmode==4) materialflags += 16;//terrain

So it would actually be possible to copy this shader and modify it to either remove decals or trick the renderer into thinking the entity is a different class.