> However, using a transparent color significantly slowed down the number that can be drawn too which doesn't make as much sense to me. I'd imagine that with hardware today transparency should be somewhat free.<p>That's because transparency limits how you can batch draws on the GPU. With opaque draws, you can use the depth buffer and draw in any order you like e.g. maximizing batching. With transparency, you need to draw things in the right order for blending to work (painters order).
Seriously fun exploration.<p>> Layering. That is an important word.<p>Layering is also the key to the (silly but also sometimes good-looking) effects from my text shadow project from 14yrs ago: <a href="https://paulirish.github.io/mothereffingtextshadow/" rel="nofollow">https://paulirish.github.io/mothereffingtextshadow/</a>
I'm totally down for some good old fashioned impractical hacking. But just remember, we already have canvas, which can do all this easier, faster, and better.
Looking at the music visualizations was definitely cool. Really miss the old winamp days when you could play music and just run the visualizer full screen. I wish that streaming audio players did this today.
> It also turns out that some smart people figured out maths hacks to draw rounded boxes for super cheap which UI peeps love because with this hack boxes can be so round as to appear as circles<p>Any references to learn more about these hacks?
My kind of hackin'
Almost like an antichrist to the Josh Comeau posts I've read on the topic <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=josh+comeau+shadows" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=josh+comeau+shadows</a>
A great, possibly the greatest article I read this year ended with "your welcome" instead of "you're". Fix asap! Or maybe I didn't get the joke, that's a possibility
For the past 30 years I got good at programming but never really did graphics because I didn't like games. I now view it as a massive oversight and have been trying to catch up for over a year.<p>So hard.
This discussion around adding shadows to window boarders in imgui is also interesting: <a href="https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/1329">https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/1329</a>