Cool, very interesting.
I thought alpha made sense for that reason too. Obviously shaders do it in some fancy way that I don’t understand.
That makes me feel great for the new game I’m making lol
Then again, I’m mostly just making it to learn LWJGL.
To make this slightly on-topic: That looks very cool, though I have no idea what direction that goes in
… You like vector component swizzling? >_> Single-channel alpha textures were removed with OpenGL 3.2 (well, deprecated) since when using shaders they’re identical to a single-channel red channel texture. Instead of having fifty-eleven different single-channel textures (luminance, intensity, red, alpha, etc) they just removed all of them except red since the only difference between them was how the fixed functionality pipeline interpreted them.
Hmm, you lost me there!
I thought that all colours in computer land were ARGB or something similar, and the ‘alpha-channel’ was the ‘A’ in ARGB which can be represented by a number.
Since you can just treat your texture as whatever you want (a normal map, a displacement map, a shinyness map, etc) with shaders there’s no need to have texture formats with the same number of channels and the same precision. The only difference between a GL_ALPHA texture and a GL_RED texture is that in a shader, you’ll have to write [icode]textureSample.a[/icode] instead of [icode]textureSample.r[/icode]. The only remaining texture formats are GL_RED (GL_R8), GL_RG, GL_RGB and GL_RGBA for 1 to 4 channels of data. There are variations like floating point, half float and integer formats instead of byte formats too. GL_RGB16F = 3 channels, 16-bit half float.