TGEA Color Tinting Shadergen Addition

This modification will allow you to add ColorTinting to TGEA's shadergen material system. This is deal for RPGs in that it allows you to tint your armor or player skins to different colors without needing to use different textures. The performance impact is minimal, only adding one instruction to the pixel shader.

Most of the modifications occur in C++. They are:

in Shadergen/shaderfeature.cpp add this block of code near the end of the file:

void UseTintColorFeat::processPix( Vector<ShaderComponent*> &componentList, 
                              GFXShaderFeatureData &fd )
{

   // grab connector texcoord register
   ConnectorStruct *connectComp = dynamic_cast<ConnectorStruct *>( componentList[C_CONNECTOR] );
   Var *tintColor = new Var;
   tintColor->setType( "float4" );
   tintColor->setName( "tintColor" );
   tintColor->uniform = true;
   tintColor->constNum = PC_USERDEF2;

   Var *color = (Var*) LangElement::find( "col" );


      MultiLine * meta = new MultiLine;
      
      meta->addStatement( new GenOp( "   @ *= @;\r\n",color,tintColor) );
      output = meta;
   
}

Add this block of code to ShaderFeature.h:

class UseTintColorFeat : public ShaderFeature
{
public:
   virtual void processPix( Vector<ShaderComponent*> &componentList, 
                            GFXShaderFeatureData &fd );
};

in Materials/matinstance.cpp add this code near line 160 where all of the other shader features are added:

if ((i==GFXShaderFeatureData::UseTintColor) && (mMaterial->useTintColor[stageNum]))
		  fd.features[i] = true;

In materials/materials.h add this to the public area of the class:

ColorF            tintColor[MAX_STAGES];
   bool				 useTintColor[MAX_STAGES];

In materials/materials.cpp around line 55 you should see this:

specular[i].set( 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0 );

add these lines of code beneath it:

tintColor[i].set( 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0 );
	  useTintColor[i] = false;

Then around line 140 in the InitPersistFields area add this:

addField("tintColor",    TypeColorF, Offset(tintColor,   Material), MAX_STAGES);
   addField("useTintColor",    TypeBool, Offset(useTintColor,   Material), MAX_STAGES);

then in the SetShaderConstants function find this line:

GFX->setVertexShaderConstF( VC_MAT_SPECPOWER, (float*)&specularPower[stageNum], 1 );

and add this beneath it:

GFX->setPixelShaderConstF( PC_USERDEF2, (float*)&tintColor[stageNum], 1 );

In shadergen/featuremgr.cpp find this line:

mFeatures[ GFXShaderFeatureData::BaseTex ] = new BaseTexFeat;

and add this below it:

mFeatures[ GFXShaderFeatureData::UseTintColor ] = new UseTintColorFeat;

Finally, open up gfx/gfxstructs.h and find the line in the ShaderFeatureData enum that reads:

BaseTex,

and add this below it:

UseTintColor,

That is all of the engine changes, so now let's set up a material to make sure that this works. Here's an example material which will shade the material red:

new Material(body0mat)
{
   baseTex[0] = "~/data/shapes/character/textures/body/body1.dds";
   tintColor[0] = "1.0 0.1 0.1 1.0";
   useTintColor[0] = true;
};

The tintColor[0] = "1.0 0.1 0.1 1.0"; line is where we specify a value to multiply our texture by. In this case it is set to 1.0 Red, 0.1 Green, 0.1 Blue and 1.0 Alpha. That will reduce the green and blue values to 10% of the original, while keeping the red color. To tint in other shaders simply modify the first three values of this line to whatever color variable you want. So long as the useTintColor isn't set to true for the current pass then no tinting will occur.

Enjoy!