Facing Posters

i actually use a prefab for some of my plugins icons in the world. this is done by creating a prefab and adding the art in billboard mode. if you would like, when i get time i can try to make a plugin for this. tho the images would have to be saved into the plugins directory before hand. but it could allow for taking an image(like in your other post) and treat is as a billboard.

Quote from krazmuze

So somehow you get unity access even though the game has not done billboards? Why would you not use the existing Graphics dir that posters require - it is because the art becomes part of the plugin itself?

The plugins folder is one of the few folders that you never have to worry about it being modified, etc. by an update.

its kinda confusing to be honest. the api supports unity prefabs. could make a parameterized prefab that accepts an image(Texture). then the prefab is loaded into the world. the images should be stored separately from poster to keep things clean. also posters are converted to .CIMG files.

That's a great idea, I will add an option for posters to behave like billboards I'm not 100% sure though if this will make it into the next update...

But it's basically also possible to achieve that through the Plugin API, as mentioned by james1bow . It doesn't necessarily require prefabs, because a quad with a texture would be sufficient for that. The ModelAsset class provides direct access to some built-in meshes (including a plane/quad). The game also has a built-in billboard component which could be added via Model.addComponent() (the name of the component would be "BillboardComponent").

Unfortunately the API only provides a not-so-performant way to access custom images... it's possible to get the raw byte data from a custom image and create a new TextureAsset from it (via TextureAsset.load()), but this causes unnecessary overhead because the client has to download both the custom image and the (identical) texture asset... I will add another, more performant way to create a texture asset from a custom image directly

Quote from krazmuze

So with Posters I put it in Graphics (which I needed to create) then that enabled the browser to select the image and upload to the game (even though I am offline I presume its same UI for online)

Oh, when uploading a poster, you should be able to access any location on your hard drive. In the ingame file browser, just use the buttons at the top to get to your computer or the desktop, for example.

Quote from krazmuze

not sure what upload is actually doing.

This adds the image to your ingame library for this world. When playing multiplayer, it uploads it on the server (because posters are visible for all players). In singleplayer, it's basically just "uploading" the image to your current world^^