Customizable material rendering

[rebb]

The topic might sound scary, but this is sort of a "multi-level" suggestion, with different levels from "simplest" to "wtf bloat".

Currently special textures like trigger / clip / skip / water etc are being rendered like everything else in the map, as a fully opaque surface.

It could be useful to be able to define somewhere which textures are to be drawn in a special way and how. Possibly by having special configuration files which contain texture-names and their respective rendering options.

• Level 1
  The "simplest" form would just offer a way to set certain textures to be semi-transparent.
  This already goes a long way for things like skip / clip / trigger / water etc, imo.
• Level 2 ( aka the "Are you kidding me ?!" level )
  On top of being able to set if a texture/material is transparent, the user could set the name of a custom vertex/fragment shader to be used. Said custom shaders would get supplied by TrenchBroom with the same/similar basic uniform data, and as such would have to be set up in a similar way by the user.

[kduske]

Level 1 sounds good, but I don't see the point for level 2. That sounds like overkill to me.

[necros0]

Yes, I've been meaning to mention something like this. Thanks for posting it rebb. There definitely needs to be this for at least things like triggers, clips and skip. water would be nice to have too.

For mods, maybe have a way to define transparency in the def file?

[ryanbriscall]

I would think the def file is a universal file for any editors, therefore I disagree with the idea of defining transparency for textures in the def file. Unless I'm mistaken about the def file being a universal file.

Only in quake 2 or 3, were there shaders where you defined that. But not the def file?

[kduske]

For now I have hardcoded this. We'll see how much customization is really necessary.