The longevity of support on this is mind-blowing. Thank you!
I'm having trouble understanding the LoadTexture flags 2 and 4. Specifically, despite loading a PNG or TGA 32ARGB texture with flag 1+2 I get a flag 1+4 behaviour of 32RGB texture with alpha channel being ignored completely. Does B3D even support alpha channel textures in the "modern" way we understand it?
EDIT: figured things out, the problem was unrelated to the texture handling.
Textures with alpha channel used to work just fine in Blitz3d. (Haven’t tried it with the 2024 versions.) Back then, a common problem was that one would use 16-bit graphics mode, where there isn’t a lot of bits left for alpha info. This would make gradients feel like masked; it could be solved by also adding mode 512.
The real problem is the lack of Z-ordering of surfaces with alpha. We are reviving an old gaming project which went open source and try to modernise the graphics to reach some new audience. We wanted to switch from masked to alpha textures and we have a tough decision to make now.
I find the omission of alpha Z-ordering rather puzzling as it had to be implemented analogously for opaque surfaces before alpha surfaces were even considered. It probably wouldn't be difficult to add a flag enabling alpha Z-ordering directly in the Blitz source, and certainly easier than doing it in the Blitz code, as the Z-order needs to be updated per-mesh relative to active camera, in each frame.
