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Yes, transparency is the most common use of an Alpha channel -- anything that's white shows 100% texture image, black is 100% background image, shades of gray will mix a proportional amount of the two.
It's very easy to use transparency, and I've always used it for the "clear" parts of the fish, the fins of my saltwater fish and various body parts of my freshwater fish. But the extra realism I'm going for in 3.0 has brought up a problem: When you look "through" the fin of an actual fish, you can't really see a clear image of what's on the other side. It's blurry, like frosted glass. Using shaders, it's possible to achieve this effect. Instead of combining each pixel with the one directly under it, the program would average each pixel with several underneath it. Some XP programs do this when windows overlap each other, but virtually no one notices it.
That's my problem -- is it worth the development time and clock-cycle overhead to do this, or would it be lost on 99% of the people viewing it?
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