Characters need looks that their own material cannot give them: dissolving away during a teleport, glowing as a silhouette, a status effect’s tint. The client gets all of these from one shader with a set of knobs, plus one small node per entity that moves those knobs over time.

The entity uber material link

Every character body (masters, bestias, townsfolk) is drawn with Game/Entity/Fx/Shader/entity_uber.gdshader. It draws three things in one pass:

• The base look: albedo colour and texture, metallic, roughness, and optionally a normal map, emission and an alpha cut-out. These are ordinary material parameters, set per material in the inspector.
• The weather: wet and snow, the same rule the prop overlay uses (weather_cover.gdshaderinc). Characters therefore get no weather overlay, which saves a second draw per body in rain.
• The fx knobs: instance uniforms, set per body. With every knob at its default, the body looks exactly like its base material.

A pass on top could not do this. An overlay draws over the body, but it cannot make the body under it disappear, so a dissolve needs the body’s own material.

Instance uniforms belong to one mesh instance and are not shared through the material. So a hundred masters still share one material per hair and skin colour, and each can fade on its own.

A new visual link

The shader is assigned in the editor, never by code:

1. For a model (.glb), open Advanced Import Settings → Materials and, for each material, enable Use External with a ShaderMaterial .tres next to the model. The .tres uses entity_uber.gdshader with the model’s texture in albedo_texture. See Game/Master/Parts/master_skin.tres.
2. For a scene-built visual, give the mesh a ShaderMaterial with the uber shader directly, as BestiaVisual.tscn does.

In a debug build, a body drawn without the uber material says so once in the log, because its effects would otherwise silently not show.

Playing effects: EntityFx link

Every Entity has an EntityFx child (Game/Entity/Fx/entity_fx.gd). It plays an EntityFxDef (entity_fx_def.gd), a resource with one Curve per knob over the effect’s duration, plus colours, a dissolve direction, an optional particle burst, and these flags:

• freeze holds the body’s animation still while the effect plays.
• reverse plays the curves backwards, so a vanish def can also serve as an appear.
• hold_end keeps the end state until the next effect plays: a vanished body stays gone until it appears.

Effects layer. A teleport can play over a status tint. Each knob shows the strongest effect driving it. A knob no effect drives is left alone, so a visual’s own animation of it (the placeholder bestia’s death fade) still works.

Idle costs nothing. EntityFx processes only while an effect moves, and writes knobs only then.

What cannot dissolve fades instead. A carried torch is not part of the body’s material, so it dims with the dissolve and is gone halfway (Visual.set_effect_fade).

Three ways to trigger an effect link

The server component is synced like any other: an observer who walks into view while it plays gets it with the entity’s snapshot. That is why a teleport’s appear shows even to somebody who only sees the destination.

The teleport effects link

The fly wing and the butterfly wing use four defs in Game/Entity/Fx/DB/:

The server holds the body still for the vanish, then moves it and sends the appear. It sends the duration with each effect, so the lengths are tuned in the zone’s application.yml (teleport-items.*) without a client build.

A jump onto ground the client has already drawn shows no loading screen. A fly wing only lands on such ground, so it never shows one. A butterfly wing goes far, so it does.

Tuning: the effect harness link

Dev/EntityFxHarness/EntityFxHarness.tscn shows a master and the placeholder bestia, with a panel to:

• play any effect, or a vanish followed by its appear, once or in a loop;
• slow everything down, or scrub through an effect frame by frame;
• drive every knob by hand, with the dissolve direction;
• lay a status tint underneath, and switch the weather between dry, rain and snow.

  godot --path bestia-client/src res://Dev/EntityFxHarness/EntityFxHarness.tscn
  

With -- --out=DIR --shots=name:KIND:progress[:weather],... it renders screenshots and quits instead.

Adding an effect link

1. Create an EntityFxDef resource in Game/Entity/Fx/DB/ and shape its curves in the inspector.
2. Tune it in the harness.
3. Hook it up:
   • for a server-timed effect, give it a kind, add the same name to EntityFxKind in entity_fx_component_smsg.proto and to EntityFx.Kind on the server;
   • for a status effect’s look, set status_effect_id;
   • for client-only feedback, call entity.fx.play(def).