Re: Shading and transparency

[James W. W. <os...@jw...>]

On Jul 16, 2005, at 1:56 PM, Steven Verstoep wrote:

> This time I am working on fixing the race-overlay of my game. This  
> was something that used to work once (Either under Quickdraw 3D or  
> under another version of quesa). The problem is that my race- 
> overlay gets shaded with the lights of my scene. I don't want this.  
> I want it to be transparent  and not shaded for which I use  
> Q3NULLIllumination_New. I am really messing my code up so I might  
> actually make things worse. However I suspect this might be a bug  
> in quesa. I render in retained mode and I think what happens is  
> that Quesa does some alpha sorting routine, but then forgets to  
> check if the texture should be rendered with lights on or off.
>
> I can actually make this work, but then all the windows of my cars  
> (which should be transparent) become white.
>

Yes, it looks like a bug.  The TQ3TransparentPrim used for drawing  
transparent stuff does include an illumination field, but it seems to  
be only used to determine whether to draw specular highlights or not.

However, I wonder if fixing this bug would really be the right way  
for you to go.  I see from your web site that your products are for  
OS X only.  An alternative would be to use an overlay window.  That  
way, you could use Quartz APIs to draw the text, which might be  
faster and easier to work with than however you're drawing the text now.