The classic question on interviews lately is "What would you ask Adobe to improve on the Flash player?". Well, I finally have a real thing to ask the guys and is to give some love to graphics.beginBitmapFill.

Since the beginning there were 2 ways of rendering your 3d scene in flash.

1. Render everything in a single Sprite / MovieClip.
2. Create a Sprite / MovieClip for each triangle or Mesh.

The second option was the most useful because you had easily properties such as opacity and even blending as Sprite/MovieClip have already those properties, but, performance-wise, option 1 was the winner hands down. So, as people wants speed, some engines have gone through the option 1 and then spent time trying to find ways to hack the properties that you get for free with option 2.

If you take a look on the drawTriangle loop inside Papervision3d in instance you'll find this:

graphics.beginBitmapFill( altBitmap ? altBitmap : bitmap, _localMatrix, tiled, smooth);

I even had to do a hack for a project where in order to be able to change the opacity of one material dynamicaly I had to generate an array of bitmapDatas with the original texture with different levels of transparency... nasty!

Wouldn't it be great if you could tell the amount of opacity and which blending to use to the beginBitmapFill?

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