Material Property Matrix

There are four over-all material-classes:

1. A standard textured material, e.g. with an albedo, optional normal/emissive, etc. Most attributes are legal!

2. An instance-friendly textured material. This is a standard textured material that does not use certain "instance-unfriendly" attributes. For example, instance-friendly textures cannot use ATTR_emissive_rgb or ATTR_no_cull. In other words, an instance-friendly textured material is more restricted than the standard one.

3. A panel-textured material sources its texture from the panel or a panel region.

4. A draped material is used for draped geometry, e.g. geometry that is cut up and applied to the ground. It has a somewhat disjoint set of legal properties compared to standard textured materials. For example, ATTR_emissive_rgb and ATTR_poly_os are both illegal on a draped material, but decals are legal.

This table shows what kinds of materials are legal for a given object being exported.

Export Type	Static Scenery	Instanced Static Scenery	Dynamic Scenery	Aircraft Object	Key Slot
Standard Textured	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Object
Instance-Textured	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Object
Panel Textured	No	No	No	Yes	Panel
Draped	Yes	Yes	No	No	Draped

Key points:

• Instanced scenery disallows the standard textured material class - only instance-textured materials are legal.
• Aircraft objects allow panel textured materials but -not- draped materials. (Draping is not allowed for aircraft and cannot be used to make a drop shadow!)

(Note: it is an intention of this design that the material class of a texture can be derived -from- the material without knowledge 'from above' about the type of export.)

This next chart lists the legality of various material properties for each class of materials. Note that the material class itself may or may not be legal for a given export -content- (e.g. the user is working on an airplane vs an airport).

Property	Standard Textured	Instance Textured	Draped	Panel Textured
Albedo Tex	Yes	Yes	Yes	Must Be Panel
Albedo Clamping	No	No	Yes	No
Lit Tex	Yes	Yes	Yes	Must Be Panel
Lit Clamping	No	No	Yes	No
Lit Level	Yes	No	No	No
Normal Tex	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Normal Clamping	No	No	Yes	No
Normal Bumpiness	No	No	Yes	No
Normal UV Scaling	No	No	Yes	No
Specular Tex	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Specular Ratio	Yes/Deprecated	Yes/Deprecated	Yes	Yes/Deprecated
Panel Tex/Regions/Global-lit	No	No	No	Yes
Draping	No	No	Required	No
Blending/Alpha Cut	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Dithering	No	No	Yes	No
Alpha Stripping	No	No	Yes	No
Decals	No	No	Yes	No
Hard/Deck	Yes	Yes	No	No
No-Draw	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Camera Wall	Aircraft-Only	Aircraft-Only	No	Yes
Polygon Offset	Yes	No	No	Yes
Manipulation	Aircraft-Only	Aircraft-Only	No	Yes
Two-sided	Yes/Deprecated	No	No	Yes/Deprecated
Flat shaded	Yes/Deprecated	No	No	Yes/Deprecated
Diffuse/Emissive RGB	Yes/Deprecated	No	No	Yes/Deprecated

Legal properties are in bold face if they must match among all properties of that material class for a single object.

For example, every material of material-class panel must have the same panel region/global lit properties. Every material of material-class draped must have the same albedo texture.

By comparison, every material can have a different hard surface and deck property.

From this logic, any given object may have at most two albedos: either a texture and panel, or a texture + draped albedo.

Note also that for draped materials, every allowed material property must match between different user-created draped materials for a single object. (In other words, where-as aspects of the standard texture material can vary within an object, the draped material cannot.)

The following properties are assumed to be not on the materials:

• Instance Tinting
• Wet/dry requirements
• Tilting
• Slope Limits
• Layer groups (normal and draped)
• LOD (normal and draped)
• Slung Load Weight
• Object-wide shadow disable