In X-Plane there are two fundamental ways that a texture can be painted “over” a background image:
- Blending, whereby the alpha channel of the new top layer decides how much we see the top layer vs. the background.
- Additive Lighting, whereby the new texture makes the background lighter.
Blending is more common. For example, if you build an OBJ, the object appears “in front of” the terrain via blending. With blending, you put the color of your new layer in the RGB channels and use the alpha channel to indicate opacity. 1.0 alpha = 100% opaque, 0.0 alpha = 0% opaque, and alpha in between will create a blend. If you omit an alpha channel, X-Plane will treat the entire layer as 100% opaque.
When a layer is applied using additive lighting, the resulting color is the sum of the background plus the new color, clamped to the maximum brightness we can show on screen. Additive lighting is good for simulating effects that really “add light”. Some examples of additive lighting in X-Plane:
- All lighting billboards are drawn additively.
- Instrument overlays are additive if you pick the appropriate mode in Plane-Maker. (The option is labeled “glass” for generics, since most glass instruments work by adding light to a nearly black screen.)
- The emissive (_lit) texture of an object is added to the albedo (daytime) texture using additive lighting.
Now just a little bit of math. In RGB color terms, black = 0,0,0 and white = 1,1,1. So if we add a pure black texture to a background additively we get:
new_r = old_r + overlay = old_r + 0 = old_r
new_g = old_g + overlay = old_g + 0 = old_g
new_b = old_b + overlay = old_b + 0 = old_b
In other words,when using additive light, adding “black” does nothing, preserving the background.
And this brings me to my main point: any time you have additive lighting you don’t need an alpha channel. You can simply make your additive lighting texture black for the parts you want to be “transparent”.
This is why I generally recommend that emissive _LIT textures for objects not have an alpha channel. In fact, for “back-lit” and “additive” instruments (these are instruments that use a second emissive _LIT texture) Plane-Maker will indicate a warning if the texture has an alpha channel. If you have a texture that is applied additively, you don’t need alpha.
At this point you might be wondering: Ben, if additive lighting doesn’t require alpha, and all lighting billboards are drawn additively, why the heck is there an alpha channel for custom lights?
The short answer is: there probably doesn’t need to be one; the original setup for lighting billboards inherited a number of idioms from older versions of X-Plane, going back to versions where lighting billboards were not additive* (and thus alpha was necessary).
The long answer is: the alpha channel is often as a general “intensity” control to turn the light up and down in amplitude, while the RGB channels are often re-interpreted in strange ways. So while RGBA color is not necessary from a graphics standpoint, it is handy that there are four color channels in the custom lights because that gives us one more parameter to play with when designing really compicated lights (like VASIs).
* Note that lighting billboards that aren’t additive don’t look very good…hence Austin switched to additive billboards.
