Transparent Materials

All the changes I have been making under the hood have started to bear fruit. Aside from the layer mask support in shadows I mentioned earlier, beams and billboards support shadows and transparency, now. And ordinary meshes can be made transparent, including ones with layered materials, just by setting an opacity. (Although, with layered materials I also need to make sure not to layer any properties, like gloss or metallic, that are not supported in the transparent shader.)

The resolution of transparent objects is reduced, and shadows for transparent materials are... a bit ugly. But what can you do? This is almost ten-year-old technology I'm working with. It's still pretty neat.

Holey Title, Batman

I have been busily rewriting the entire shader definition system to be more flexible and converting all the existing shaders over to the new system. The end result of all this is... nothing changes.

That's not exactly true. Some new features come out of this, just because a new framework makes them easier to implement. For example, masks selected by a layer selection texture can now cast shadows. There are also a lot less classes and clutter around shadow shaders in general, but that's more difficult to illustrate with an image.