How To Make Invisible Decals?

[Thegood]

Basically what I'm trying to do is have an entity that's inactive until the player picks up a note, which turns it active. I got that to work, and then I put decals on the entity, and now while its inactive you can see the decals just floating there. Is there anyway to make it so that the decals only appear when the entity is active?

[palistov]

Unfortunately, there's no way (that I'm aware of, at least) you can set decals inactive/active. You need to create an entity out of a decal to be able to set it inactive and later active.

[Thegood]

Is there an easy way to do that?

[Statyk]

Perhaps tweak around the technical black plane with the decal's image and a new .mat?

[Thegood]

Uhh I'm not very familiar with the "technical black plane" term, care to elaborate?

[Statyk]

Uhh I'm not very familiar with the "technical black plane" term, care to elaborate?

The plane entity. It's in "entities > technical > black_plane" It's like a plane, but works as an entity. It can be activated/deactivated through script.

[Thegood]

I don't see it. All I see is "block_box", "block_box_nonchar", "invisible_box_mass_2", and "commentary_icon".

[palistov]

Black plane is a static object. I'm not sure if that'll work even if you use an entity.

[Thegood]

So there's no real easy, efficient way to make decals invisible?

[Thegood]

Is it possible to use billboards and have those activate/deactivate?