transparency in character textures

[pronzilla]

In the course of some crazy experimentation¹ I tried using transparency in a character texture (specifically, head). It didn't work - it looked like there was some other texture "behind" mine. 

Is this a bug, or is it meant to work like that? 

(not necessarily a request to change the behaviour, more a query along the lines of "have I goofed somewhere?" and "what's it supposed to do?")

¹I'm playing with an idea for a non-human "girl" and wanted to give her nictating membranes, rather than regular eyelids, for extra alien-ness.

[Jak (ripened peach)]

If you want to send me the texture you were trying out I'd like to see what happened.

The alpha channel in the current Sex Sim character texture shader is used for specularity, not transparency, so there's no way at this point to have transparent skin for instance.  Down the road I'm going to try out some new shader techniques and see if I can get transparency in there via a separate map, but right now you're not doing anything wrong, it just doesn't work the way you would think (alpha as transparency).

[pronzilla]

Ah.  The texture was nothing sophisticated; I just opened up a basic one in gimp, and erased a chunk to transparent, to see what would happen.

The texture I was seeing "behind" was presumably the stuff remaining in the other three (i.e. non-alpha) channels.

Re: alpha=specularity, that could be fun to play with, too.  How does that work?  Presumably one extreme of the alpha channel maps to very "shiny", and the other extreme maps to matt/non-reflective?

[pronzilla]

thinking about it, presumably the bump map is involved, too...

[Jak (ripened peach)]

Going to give you some good answers as soon as I wrap up this update... knee deep in code at the moment!