Hey,

I understand that the new material variation system can be very useful. But I can't see how it should work with some of the things I am doing in my 3D project.

A few examples:

- players can pick their own character color. With material-lock I could just define a material in the player class, set the color, validate and lock it for drawing. Whith the variation system, I will have to have a variation for every player online.

- players can drop objects in the world and drop a material on those objects. There are 256 materials for this purpose, and they are also altered because they glow when selected by the player and drawn blended when selected by peers. Again, this was easy with the MaterialLock. With variations, even 256 variations is not enough, because I don't want to change the material for all meshes with that material applied just because one is selected.

I'm sure there are other valid scenario's wherein constant changes to the material of one mesh or meshpart are easier with MaterialLock.

Anyway, with the source available it wasn't very hard to reimplement it again. But I wonder why you left it out in the first place. Both systems could easily coexist. (And I rather keep my code as much in sync with the upstream master as I can. )

So here's the feature request: I want MaterialLock back!

Regards,

yvan

yes I agree I would love to have it back as well, I used it for changing the textures on blocks as they were being destroyed and for dyeing the color of armors, and for user supplied images to be displayed on objects in the game, I don't know how to do that without MaterialLock because the variations seem to need to be defined at compile time whereas reassigning materials dynamically using MaterialLocks that was not the case. If variations can be defined during run-time I think they would be a true replacement for MaterialLock but I don't think they can be...

+1 to this feature request.