I'd like to pass two colors to a shader. I should be able to change the colors at runtime (in c-script) and the colors should be different per entity.

I can't use material skills because that would influence all entities with that material. entSkill41..entSkill44 only have room for one color.

Is there any way this could be achieved?

you could use entskill41-44 to pass virtual texturecoordinates for looking up the colors in a special texture (filled up with fields of different colors)

did you understand the idea behind this? i never did something like this, it was just what came to my mind first, but it should be possible

Thats a good idea, but I have some concerns:
Would adding another texture (even if it is small, 8x8 pixels should do) slow things down alot? This shader will be used by every actor in my world, and although they can all share the same 'colortable texture', I think it has to be sent to the GPU for every object, right? Or will it be cached?

Another idea I came up with is this:
Every entity that uses this material gets a copy of the material (created through mtl_create) so then I can use the mtlSkills. Are there any drawbacks to this? I don't think a material takes alot of memory so storing one per entity wouldn't be a big deal.

Which one shall I go with?

if that slows things down a lot, well, i wont think so.. the second one sounds good as well. i never looked at mtl_create. but if that works, why not use mtlSkills. would be easier i guess

the texture is cached. You need some more processes in the shader pipeline. You can pass more values though:

Use mtl.skill1/2/3/4....
In the fx use "float4 vecSkill1;" as declaration.
The first four Skills are now accessible through vecSkill1.xyzw

Then vecSkill5 ...

material skills are the same for every model but you can use an event to change the skills:

Code:

---

function mat_colorsend_values() {
mtl.skill1 = float(my.skill12); // or whatever skill you need
mtl.skill2 = float(my.skill13); // or whatever skill you need
...
}

material mat_colorsend {
event = mat_colorsend_values;
flags = enable_render; // call event before every rendering process
}

---

Thanks both, I've got it working
I used mk_1's aproach since it seems to be the most elegant way to do it.

Not very elegant but it works.

Ok, least ugly