Skip depth sorting for pixel art

[davesmith00000]

Could be fiddly, but technically you don't need to depth sort any pixel art that is a combo of fully opaque and fully transparent pixels. Using the depth buffer instead, reducing overdraw and per frame scene sorting.

Detecting whether a material / texture can be used this way is the trick. Maybe we set a material flag or something? Maybe we can inspect the image data on load?

[davesmith00000]

Actually, IIRC, that's what Flash used to do. You could manually tell it whether the graphics used transparency or not.