Particles with material support?

[saindd]

I've noticed that in the editor, the particles only support simple textures. Apparently, there's no support for materials, so i can't use normal-mapped bullet-holes or other effects with different specularity/normals, etc. Not even animated particles.

Is there a way to circumvent this?

[LukasPJ]

I'd recommend you to write your own shaders instead of using the material system, as it would be too much work using materials in an efficient way. It's not just flip a switch (I tried once) also the material system is not geared for particles at the moment

[saindd]

But that kinda defeats the purpose of using the engine per-se. The pros are the editors and the abstractions.

Why do you say using materials is not efficient?

[Duion]

You can have normal mapped bullet holes, since they are decals and not particles.

[LukasPJ]

I'm not completely sure, but I believe materials did some unnecessary work for particles.

Also, particles have some features that materials don't currently have. Most important is the softness, so you'd have to implement that too on materials to avoid losing functionality.

Anyways, I'm not saying it's impossible to do in a proper and efficient way, just saying that it'll take a lot of work.