Hey, I've been trying to create a new AI character, and I was doing the shaders and I noticed this:

When geometry of the new character overlaps, you can see it is less transparent and it looks really bad.
Now, looking at Cortana, this doesn't happen:

Now, I've copied the shaders directly from Cortana, all I changed was the bitmap. I'm guessing the bitmap is the problem, but I'm not sure. Anyway. I'm wondering how this effect that Cortana has is achieved, where it's still transparent, but you can't see overlapping pieces of geometry like on my character.

I can only guess that it may be how your bitmap is compressed.

I'd say its the way the actual models are setup.

I've checked both those things. The only difference is the cortana is in dxt3 format while mine is in dxt1. If I change it to dxt3, the bitmap turns all white. If I try to compile with the dxt3 setting on, it will overwrite back to dxt1. The only difference between the 2 gbxmodels is that all of Cortana's geometry has the ZONER flag turned on, but if I do that for my gbxmodel, Sapien crashes with this error:
05.17.10 18:20:27 EAX: 0x172A4000
05.17.10 18:20:27 EBX: 0x00000001
05.17.10 18:20:27 ECX: 0x0013BB64
05.17.10 18:20:27 EDX: 0x00001000
05.17.10 18:20:27 EDI: 0x0013D5C8
05.17.10 18:20:27 ESI: 0x00000000
05.17.10 18:20:27 EBP: 0x0013D4A0
05.17.10 18:20:27 ESP: 0x0013D490
05.17.10 18:20:27 EIP: 0x7C90E514, C3 8D A4 24 ?????
05.17.10 18:20:27 EXCEPTION halt in \halopc\haloce\source\models\models.c,#498: part->num_nodes > 0

Does your bitmap have an alpha?

No, because if I make a new channel to use as an alpha I get this error:
data\characters\thor\bitmaps\thor.tiff: Cannot handle 5-channel data.
==> !!WARNING!! failed to open TIFF: not a TIFF file <==

Why do you have 4 channels o.o
R G B Alpha
???