Stipple transparency

Software concept

An early and fast method of producing transparent surfaces by stippling the surface.Such as by creating a checkerboard type pattern of opaque and fully transparent pixels (checkerboard binary transparency).

28
games
9
platforms

Alternate names: Stipple binary transparency
Name variations: stipple alpha, texture stippling

This was used back when hardware acceleration of transparent surfaces was still very poor and doing it on software was too slow. In modern games this may be used as a performance boost for transparency that is seen for so brief period that player is unlikely to consider it as worse quality.

Mostly interesting when done on software dynamically, but this can easily be done on the textures/sprites themselves because it's just a specific way of using binary transparency or mimicking binary transparency with alpha channel based transparency.

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Games by year

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The first Stipple transparency video game was released in 1989.

Wolfire Games, Beamdog and Koei Tecmo published most of these games.

Platforms

Windows 12
Amiga 3
MS-DOS 3
Linux 3
Atari ST 2
Mac OS X 2
PS4 1
Saturn 1
X68000 1