There is no possibility of (uniformly) editing the visibility of entities at runtime.
In Nauvis Melange there is a car, a travel worm (not in current release yet, but in git master), that can be called via a thumper. When called a chain of events are activated, to simulate the travel worm digging into the ground and then coming back up. Currently the time between animations, the entity is obstructed with dust, but comes at the cost that the dust can be either very thick (animation way) and appears out of nowhere (pretty ugly) or is too thin (smoke entity). Since the visibility cant be changed, I need to obstruct the sight on the worm, so the overlaying animations dont look out of place.
Details:
This could be achieved in multiple ways.
- A boolean field that if true renders the entity to every force, if not it doesnt
- A function or field that takes a force or a table of forces, which represent the forces an entity can be rendered too
- that could work too viewtopic.php?f=28&t=99569 but still leaves the need for necessarly obstructing the entity, instead of using it as nice addition
- Another solution that doesnt need to change the visibility of entity (i just have no idea what)
For example we would like to animate (parts of) an entity, that doesnt allow for animations, or has no possibility of this certain animation. Then the original entity would either need to change surfaces, position, be cloned and killed, start without any animation/texture and be manually animated, or animate something opaque over it. All of those solutions are costly and could be avoided.