Text in front of text transparency

Question

When text is displayed in front of other text, the background text does not display correctly through the transparent parts of the letter. It looks like there is a surrounding box around each individual character of the text where no other text is displayed. See the b example in the screenshot, where I marked the surrounding box.

However, this behavior seems to apply to text/text relationships only. Where I have text in front of cubes, the cube color shines through correctly.

All objects are real text objects, no images, not textures. The text objects themselves are not transparent, they are opaque. But I expect them to be, well, transparent in the holes of the letters (sorry, I'm a non-native English speaker, if you understand what I mean, you can edit this sentence).

Is this a bug which should be reported or can I influence this behavior somewhere?

Version info: Blender 2.70, downloaded
Render Engine: Blender Game
Download SSCCE .blend file

Open the SSCCE in Blender 2.70. Hover your mouse over the 3D viewport. Press P to start game engine. Move your mouse so that the two text objects overlap.

Answer 1

If only I could get more details as to what exactly you expect from the software, I might be able to answer your question right.

However, from you explanation, I replicated that, and I'm not seeing any problem.

What version of blender are you using? You built from source or downloaded from blender.org?

I just set my transparency to the desired value in the materials tab in the properties panel and all seem to go well.

By the way, I used the bge too.

Answer 2

I"m on my tablet right now, so I can't look at the blend. I used to have a ton of issues with texts, but here's the main fix. Just change the text into an actual mesh(Alt+C > Mesh), then put the material with transparency. Though this will not work if you want your text to change, there is a long process. This way, the text will have more quality, and you can out transparency, just as any other object.

Answer 3

The game engine seems to convert your text objects to planes with a character texture automatically. Note that new Text objects I added to the scene were converted to a mesh instead which worked fine since the text borders were not defined by transparency. I couldn't figure out which setting caused the text-to-texture conversion, otherwise I would advise you to turn it off.
The problem the transparent textures introduce is that the objects need to be rendered back to front for the transparency to show correctly (see also my answer here). For normal meshes you could just add a material and set the 'Alpha Blend' mode in the material's 'Game Settings' to 'Alpha Sort'. Unfortunatly this seems not to work for your text objects, since they seem to not react to any material settings at all.

The only easy solution I found to this problem is to convert the text objects to a mesh by pressing [Alt+C] and selecting 'Mesh from Curve/Meta/Surf/Text'. This will also remove the resolution problem. Note that this will make your text uneditable, so you probably want to keep a copy of your original text somewhere (on a different layer perhaps).

Answer 4

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a limitation of the way the text is generated in Blender. Converting to mesh is OK but very messy for those wanting the convenience of text editing.

A work around below I am using might be better for some.

Just animate the TEXT you want in clear view in a particular scene a little in front of the TEXT2 interfering with the TEXT that is visible. Then it doesn't matter that TEXT2 behind is not truly transparent.

Don't forget to move the TEXT back to the old position when you make it transparent again, otherwise the different text images creep forward when used multiple times. It may sound clumsy, but usually involves just animating a single axis to move TXT forward, inserting one animation key, or two keys to set it in place for a longer time, then duplicate the first key to move it back again later in the sequence.