Atom alpha blending vs overlay blending

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Sep 26 2014, 5:07 pm
I'm finding it pretty annoying not having control of the behavior when you want to construct your character's look using overlays (adding hair pieces, weapon attachments, and more), you will want to have control over some addons transparency as well as having the entire character including his addons (considered a single image) transparency

I guess you could do this with attached objects, but that's not ideal.
Sep 29 2014, 6:38 am
In response to FIREking
FIREking wrote:
Lummox JR wrote:
The thing is to display an icon and all its overlays as one unit, it basically has to be one whole icon. If we were to try to do this on the client end, basically we'd have to grab all icons for the same atom on the exact same layer that were meant to be treated as one unit (i.e., had the proposed setting), render them to an offscreen buffer, and render the result as a new sprite with the color+alpha mask.

Is that not doable?

It would be iffy. Software mode would basically have to create a temporary device context, draw all the icons there, then re-draw the result later as one unit. This would be slow. In DirectX, I think it'd have to render to a texture, which would be rather a pain to figure out.

As I mentioned I believe the webclient would have an easier time of this than any, because of the way its display objects are handled.
Oct 13 2014, 8:20 am
Could we at least get this as a feature in the webclient, and go from there?
Oct 14 2014, 9:25 am
I'm only offering a guess that this might work for the webclient. To be honest I'm not sure it would.

But the feasibility of actually combining icons that way at draw time is only one of the concerns, as I noted. The others are that you'd probably need a new var (though not necessarily), and it would only work for icons sharing the exact same layer.
Jan 27 2016, 11:44 am
Lummox JR resolved issue with message:
A new appearance_flags value, KEEP_TOGETHER, allows an icon to be drawn together with all its overlays/underlays/images before being subjected to changes in color, alpha, transform, etc. With this flag, mobs that have many overlays can use the alpha value to fade out and the whole mob will fade as one unit, rather than each icon fading separately.

KEEP_APART can be used for any overlays or images that you don't want to be included in the group. Icons on other planes will automatically use KEEP_APART.
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