There are lots of times I'd like to scroll an objects texture, but need its alpha transparency to stay in place. How hard would this be?

Hi,

i think you have to split the texture and the alpha-channel into two texture-stages so you can define the scrolling seperatly.

put this into a pixelshader:

Code:

---

...
{
...
float3 rgb=tex2D(skin,texCoord+float2(offset.x,offset.y));//u can use vecSkill41 for passing values
float4 foralpha=tex2D(skin,texCoord);

return float4(rgb,foralpha.a);
}

---

Thanks!

Now that I'm on a video card that actually supports shaders (yay!) I plan to start learning them.

But right now I'm still new to all this, I don't suppose you could post a full working snippet of this to get me started? That'd be awesome.

You say to put that in a pixel shader, and since that's the whole effect I'm looking for, I'm guessing that's basically all there is to it, however I don't know what the minimum code required for the rest of the shader would be.

thats easy, i have a written a small tutorial that shows you how to setup an shader in HLSL... just look at the top of the shader forum for this:
Introduction to HLSL shaders.. once you have the sample shader working, you can put in ello's code (it wont have an lighting, but do this first, then i can show you how to add vertex lighting).