Simple objects are a great feature to place mission objects without the burden of vehicle simulation. But since hidden selection textures are used in a wide scope, simple objects are somewhat limited. Currently, there is no way of placing "cosmetic" objects like weapons or uniforms without offering the player to pick them up. Disabling simulation on the underlying weapon holder does the trick, but does not hide the inventory action and confuses the players. This is especially true for backpacks and uniforms. Backpacks are simulated separately and in a special way and thus placing them as simple objects would be great to get rid of the network traffic hit. Uniforms, however, cannot be placed as simple objects since the model itself is pure white.
Simple objects currently only support the texturing that is defined in the model. Placing weapons in a certain color, colored uniforms or even signs as simple objects is not possible at all.
We hereby request the option of using setObjectTexture / setObjectTextureGlobal on simple objects. The syntax can be the same as for normal vehicles. If possible, supporting setObjectMaterial / setObjectMaterialGlobal would round things up.
The script function "hideSelection" can already access a certain selection in the model and thus the underlying technology appears to be already in place.
This feature would allow lowering the vehicle count on multiplayer servers while reducing network traffic and rendering performance.