From TDN

First up, we'll be starting our spelunking session with the following thread as a guideline for the additional raycasts:

www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=29713

This is so we'll have a few tools in our set that allow us to grab the visual face, and material of an object.

A few examples of this are as follows (and apologies for not making this a generalised sceneobject based solution right off the bat. Still studying that wrinkle):

As has been noted several times in several places, the engine at this point has undergone several revisions in a verry orgainic manner, wich means there is no real unified methodology readily available for this set of uses. as such, we're going to need to further sub-divide the chain into several avenues of uses.

Phase 0 - Material Based Effects - General Support Functions

Phase 1- Material Based Effects - Detection - Diffs
Phase 2- Material Based Effects - Detection - shapeBase Derivatives
Phase 3- Material Based Effects - Detection - Legacy Terrain
Phase 4- Material Based Effects - Detection - Polysoup 1.03 rescource
Phase 5- Material Based Effects - Detection - Atlas Terrain (Blended)
Phase 6- Material Based Effects - Detection - Atlas Terrain (Unique)

Backtrace: Material Based Effects Projects