I'm Looking Through You

Order independent transparency (OIT): first, the shiny robot.

So first, what's so special about this? Well, if you've ever worked with a lot of translucency in X-Plane, you know that it doesn't work very well - you invariably get some surfaces that disappear at some camera angles.

The problem is that current GL rendering requires translucent surfaces to be drawn from farthest to nearest, and who is far and who is near changes as the camera changes. There are lots of tricks for trying to get the draw order mostly right, but in the end it's somewhere between a huge pain in the ass and impossible.

What's cool about the robot data is that the graphics card is drawing the transparency even if it is not drawn from back to front, which means the app can just shovel piles of translucent triangles into the card and let the hardware sort it out (literally).

X-Plane is currently riddled with transparency-order bugs, and the only thing we can do is burn a pile of CPU and add a ton of complexity to solve some of them partly. That proposition doesn't make me happy.

So I am keeping an eye on hardware-accelerated OIT - it's a case where a GPU feature would make it easier for modelers to create great looking content.