_SETALPHA Question

[TerryRitchie]

You know, I've been thinking about this. Having to work with _RGBA seems like overkill for something as simple as wanting to fade an individual color.

Why couldn't a statement such as

_SETALPHA Level%, _RGB32(255, 0, 0), Image&

automatically include all of the alpha levels from 0 to 255?

As it stands now you either need to enter a range with _RGBA as you have shown or manually keep track of every level change at each step in the software.

Personally I kinda agree, I think the marginal amount of flexibility gained is offset by it being extremely unintuitive that `_SetAlpha` still checks the original alpha value. I don't think I've ever seen someone use the ability to target specific alphas and this isn't the first time someone has run into this confusion and asked on this forum.

That said, we can't change it now. I think personally it's a bit of a silly command since it's just a big loop (so it's expensive), it's not something you want to be using often anyway.

No, it's not very intuitive but I do see the need to allow the setting of individual alpha channel values. Instead of changing or adding to the _SETALPHA statement I think a better explanation in the Wiki would be a good alternative for now.

I'm currently reworking the _SETALPHA section in Lesson 14 of the tutorial. I completely had the explanation and example FUBARed because of the confusion I had. Yours and Steve's points and examples have set me straight.