Modding Help Possible to set renderlayer properties to a material tileset?

I'm pretty new to modding and building some custom materials (tilesets(?)) and i was wondering if there's a similar property to object orientation's renderLayer where I could have the tiles appear in front of the player?

For example, I would like the player (and other entities) to be a layer behind the red highlighted blocks


I tried putting the renderLayer tag both inside and outside the renderParameters section of the .material file and set the zLevel to a high number as a wild guess, but it didn't seem to work or produce an error in the log.

Code:

{
 "materialId" : 46206,
 "materialName" : "conkretebarrier",
 "collisionKind" : "none",
 "particleColor" : [60, 60, 60, 255],
 "itemDrop" : "conkretebarrier",

 "description" : "Concrete Barrier",
 "shortdescription" : "Concrete Barrier",
 "footstepSound" : "/sfx/blocks/footstep_stone2.ogg",
 "health" : 32,
 "category" : "materials",
 "renderLayer" : "player+1",

 "renderTemplate" : "/tiles/slopedmaterialtemplate.config",
 "renderParameters" : {
 "texture" : "conkretebarrierhighlighted.png",
 "variants" : 5,
 "lightTransparent" : true,
 "occludesBelow" : false,
 "multiColored" : false,
 "zLevel" : 9999,
 "renderLayer" : "player+1"
 }
}

any suggestions if this is even possible? Any guesses are welcome and greatly appreciated!

 

I don't believe materials use renderLayer, so the reason it isn't even erroring is that nothing is looking at the renderLayer in the first place. I think it might be wiser to create objects that look like materials than to create materials themselves, because materials aren't really meant to do that.

 

Ah, dang well that makes my life harder, thanks tho. I guess the next question would be, can you make objects such that they act like tiles and dynamically change appearance based on their surroundings?

 

Yes, it's possible. Look into animation files and Lua and you should be able to do something along those lines. If you need help, feel free to ask on the #modding channel on the starbound discord.