I've been able to get my 2D renderer to display transparent cutout textures by testing the alpha of a fragment and discarding if it is less than 1 (or any fraction really). The problem is I want to support using translucent textures.
The current way I sort my sprites is by what texture they use, so that I can minimize texture changes. The only way I can think of getting this to work properly is by scrapping that and only sorting by z-order. But I don't want to throw away the optimization I already did. Is there any way to do both?
Does only rendering in 2D simplify the problem at all?
I was hoping to support translucent sprites, but my font renderer makes translucent font textures, so I can't just only use cutouts.
EDIT: After doing some research, it seems there really is no easy way to do this. (depth peeling for a 2D renderer seems a little overkill) I'm going to compromise by having my renderer hold 2 different sets of sprites, cutouts and translucent. I can draw the cutouts first in whatever order I want, making full use of texture atlases. The translucent textures, however, will need to be in z-order, ignoring atlases.
If anyone can tell me a better way, I'm all ears.
