Virgin gam dev: here my scene with millions of polygon on each hard surface
Chad game dev: here my scene with multiple glass panels you can look through all in the same time without losing a frame (the technical artists deactivate some of the glasses to stop overdraw)
i try my best to make sure people know alpha is a hard problem??? i'm not the game engine industry and i have no control over what newcomers do and do not see.
i'll often remark to people in vrchat "you could make a crasher avatar in vrchat with like, 200 triangles by just making them big and blend"
Every engine I've ever used has been brought down to its knees by my obsession with making explosion effects entirely out of clumps of animated sprites with additive transparency 😅
Alpha as in alpha transparency as in translucent objects.
Due to how 3D rendering currently works, anything see-through that itself is visible causes something called "overdraw": GPUs will render the entire scene, and then add the colored bits in front from translucent objects in additional passes.
So, if you have, say, 3 semi-transparent squares in front of an object, the object will be rendered, then the first transparent square, then the second, then the third.
It's deeply inoptimal as it wastes GPU time redrawing the same pixel(s) over and over until every translucent object is shown.
It's an issue core to 3D graphics itself, so no matter how powerful or efficient the engine, they won't be optimal at rendering translucent objects, without cheating or cutting corners in ways that degrade the quality of the translucent effects.
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Chad game dev: here my scene with multiple glass panels you can look through all in the same time without losing a frame (the technical artists deactivate some of the glasses to stop overdraw)
i'll often remark to people in vrchat "you could make a crasher avatar in vrchat with like, 200 triangles by just making them big and blend"
ABSOLUTE PAIN
💀
Due to how 3D rendering currently works, anything see-through that itself is visible causes something called "overdraw": GPUs will render the entire scene, and then add the colored bits in front from translucent objects in additional passes.
It's deeply inoptimal as it wastes GPU time redrawing the same pixel(s) over and over until every translucent object is shown.