Re: [Celestia-developers] GLSL Betterness!

[Selden E B. Jr <se...@le...>]

Chris,

You wondered

>  Does anyone feel that there are outstanding bugs serious enough to
> block a 1.4.0 release? I'd like to aim for an early May release. 

Unfortunately, I really think the transparency problem for SSC Mesh
objects needs to be fixed. I know you've worked on it in the past,
but it's still frustrating people creating models.

Specifically, when a PNG image with an alpha channel is
applied to a CMOD mesh, the transparent areas are opaque but black
and the vertices within the model file are not correctly depth sorted.

Here's an example:
http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/imgages/trans-bug.jpg

Addon to demonstrate it:
http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/imgages/trans-bug.zip

Also, I think it would be good if some of the problems in the
multiple source/multiple shadow code could be avoided. I'm thinking
mostly of the cases where red images are generated as a side effect
of Celestia trying to draw too many shadow effects simultaneously.
Hopefully it'd be possible to insert a test so that the bad code
just doesn't get written to the shaders.

Selden