cost of transparency?

I've heard that using the transparency control on the Texture Tab increases your taxes because of the added computational cost. Can anyone verify this? It doesn't appear to be reflected in the object tax stated on the General Tab, which does reflect the size and elevation of the object.

(I'd prefer to use the alpha channel directly even if transparency didn't cost extra, just to reduce the computational load. But I'd like to know about the tax implications, too.)

To my knowledge setting transparency does not effect taxes.

There's currently no tax on transparency. Some might argue that there should be, because having lots of transparent objects lowers framerates, espacially for people with older video cards. But for the time being it doesn't cost extra and we have no near-term plans to make it cost extra.

Thanks for the info. Much appreciated.

One reason that there probably isn't a cost for transparency is because it's so easy to get around. You can make a transparent or semi-transparent object without adjusting the transparency controls at all; all you have to do is create a trasnparent texture. I don't profess to be an expert, but I would think that it would be more trouble than its worth to try to police trasnparency and tax it accordingly.

I think it'd be trivially easy to tax transparency: add a tax based on usage of the Transparency control on the Texture Tab. Note that this is different from creating a texture that has intrinsic transparency, i.e. that uses the alpha channel. You can create an intrinsically transparent texture without using SL's Tranparency control. That would be free, because I'm assuming that that doesn't place an extra processing burden on the SL servers. But as soon as you use the Transparency control on an object, a dollar could be added to the object's tax.

Not that I'm recommending this, necessarily. The Transparency control is an easy way for people to play with transparency without having to become proficient in Photoshop or some other image manipulation program, and that's a good thing which perhaps offsets the added computational burden.