Transparent Textures are Broken At Certain Transparencies

I just realized what this is. The rendering of partial transparency in Minecraft has changed, it's taking the stuff that's mostly transparent and bumping it down to 0% opaque, and taking the stuff that's mostly opaque and setting it to like 90% opaque or something. I think at least, due to my nether portal looking more opaque than it should. I'll have to test with ice.

Gah, and boy was I right. It seems that anything <50% opaque is being truncated to 0. This is really bad. I hope this was just some issue caused by different libraries (hopefully fixable) and not an intentional limitation.

Hey insomniac_lemon! You seem to be fascinated by my (Kyle8497) posts, especially on the Minecraft Forums! I must thank you for your input on this as well.

Actually, as usual (lately it's been happening) I was going to report this myself, but upon searching you had already created the ticket. 😛

Does this happen when you turn off mipmapping?

Ok, as of 13w38c:

My hotbar and water are fixed.

Rain is still invisible.

Ice however, is a strange one. It seemingly toggles on its own between broken and fixed. Everything affects this state, such as moving, shooting a bow, breaking blocks (but not placing them?). Going far away enough seems to fix it, and so does having active redstone nearby (although it can still break temporarily in this state. This happens regardless of MIP mapping, Anisotropic filtering, and shaders (as it was before).

I uploaded a resource pack above with the ice in it you can use to test it. I'll make one of those for rain and add it to that .ZIP, too, seeing as that's still broken.

EDIT: Ok, I think rain is fixed now. I think in 13w38a I broke it when I used an image optimizer on it (after un-indexing it to see if that is what was causing it). I did a gradient test like ice and it turned out good, and then I switched back and it was fixed. I replaced the image with a good one, but for some reason a texture reload didn't fix it right away.

Now there's just the ice transparency issue left.

I just downloaded the updated Snapshot 13w38c and noticed that the textures work fine when you're close to the water, but are broken when at a distance. I uploaded two more pictures that show what I mean. Oh, and custom rain works now.

EDIT: This happens whether mipmapping is on or off.

Ok, now I'm having the issue with still water again. It seemed to be working fine until I opened up a different map, and now it's broken on all maps. It's similar to my comment on ice above, but doesn't get fixed in as many scenarios (seems to be only really block destruction).

I'll update the resource pack with my still water texture.

Got the same problem, if I am close to the water, no issue. However as soon as I am higher than y85 it suddenly turns "invisible" and all I see is a black shadow where the water is supposed to be. I tried all the options in the video settings but nothing changed that. Strangely if I go down from y85 the water only turns blue again at height y75. Also using a texture pack and also tried other texture packs that seem to have the same issues. Just in case I tried without texture pack and no issue whatsoever. Some input/ideas on this would be nice. Is this a "technical" issue or do we need to adjust texture packs in some ways? (edit: i forgot that this is happening with 13w39a)

Kyle, you should edit the description and title to reflect 13w41a. With stained glass, this is a bigger issue than before.

Stained glass doesn't have backface culling, which is a good thing on its own, but combined with this bug is bad. It's bad because you can't have opacity lower than 50%, which is made worse that without backface culling, stained glass blends with the other faces, which means it's ALWAYS being blended between 2 faces, so it ends up being much more opaque than the texture itself. Because of this bug, you cannot have a lower opacity texture to compensate for that.

(on a side note, to fix the blending issue, the texture could possibly be halved in opacity before being mapped)

@insomniac_lemon
I added a dirty solution here, which processes all .png's in a resource pack: http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/1o5991/minecraft_snapshot_13w41a/ccow741

It doesn't just half, it inverses the blending operation `a + a * (1 - a)`-> `1 - sqrt(1 - a)`. Downside is that it increases the amount of pixels below the threshold.

Not sure how useful this is, but I just noticed that setting particles to "Minimal" makes this issue much more prevalent.

@insomniac_lemon
Thanks It helped! After decreasing the transparency in my stained glass the flickering stopped! It turned out it was only 2% more opacity needed.. Anyway now it works like a charm and still looks good 🙂

@Dinnerbone according to people on the forums, this issue seems to be related to particles. If particles are near the player, there is no issue with rendering transparency. However, if there are no particles nearby, the threshold for transparency is changed. This makes sense with my original testing I described, as when there was activated redstone (redstone smoke), landing (new landing "particle ring"), and breaking blocks all create particles. It fixes near water because of the particles that spawn in deep water.

@insomnica_lemon This also explains why it 'fixed' itself when breaking blocks. The breaking particles did so.

I guess an, eh, hotfix is spamming torches or fires.

Everything appears to be fixed in the new snapshot, 13w42a. Please see if it is fixed for you, too, or if you manage to find it being broken again.

I'm seeing this as fixed too. I will reopen if anyone finds this not being fixed.

Excuse my stupid question, but how is it supposed to be fixed? As I have still invisible water in cauldron ... in mc v.1.7.2 release...
Do I have to fix it myself in my pack?

In my RP the cauldron water is just fine, please attach the water_still.png from your resource pack 🙂

I have attached the water files - transparent water in cauldron

Can confirm what Norbert has said about cauldron water in 1.7.2. Screenshot attached.

Yep, also confirmed

well... that screenshot at least shows some water... but for me I see no water at all... just 1-3 pixels... (only in cauldron... the water is otherwise rendered correctly) O_o
attached a screenshot of my own rp.

to left empty cauldron
to right ... filled cauldron with water (notice the few dots of pixels = that´s all I see from my water in a cauldron...)

Cauldrons are still have a render bug when the water texture is too transparent in 14w02c.
I attached 2014-01-13_19.58.48.png and an edited default water_still.png