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Re: Transparency Issues

To: REALbasic Games <realbasic-games at lists dot realsoftware dot com>
Subject: Re: Transparency Issues
From: Frank Condello <developer at chaoticbox dot com>
Date: Sun, 2 Apr 2006 15:00:15 -0400
Delivered-to: realbasic-games at lists dot realsoftware dot com
References: <0CC98886-E6F6-4FB3-9598-85D5904BD823 at miensoftware dot com>
On 2-Apr-06, at 2:16 PM, Lo Saeteurn wrote:

Is there any way around that transparency issue that makes NULLShader not work?

It's a state management bug where the state of last solid object drawn may dictate some of the state used for the transparent pass. You can try drawing a solid null shaded object (like 1 triangle offscreen) right before the transparent pass (i.e. last) and see if that helps, but really this needs to be fixed in Quesa to work predictably.

I noticed how fast my text3D is without the transparency. Even 10 pages of text runs smoothly on my slow iBook.

That's most likely due to the transparency renderer trying to sort the triangles and then using (slow) immediate mode rendering to draw them back to front. It doesn't help that a bunch of triangles laying parallel to the camera clipping planes is probably the worst case for the sorter.

Does 1-bit alpha textures suffer from the same issues? If it does not, how do I use 1-bit alpha textures?

You'd use a 16bit texture (ARGB16 inside Quesa) but I'm not sure how or if the new Rb3D Material class handles that. 1bit textures aren't manually sorted since they write depth, so you won't see a sorting slowdown here, but 1 bit transparency tends to be ugly - it's only really suitable for "screen" fonts, and even then you should use nearest-neighbour filtering and turn off mipmaps. Unfortunately texture filter settings are global in Quesa.

Frank.
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