Renderer Improvements

As discussed on the IRC channel, these are some ideas for improving the renderer, I'm quite illiterate when it comes to programming so I don't know how much work any of these would be, as such I make no requests, but these are listed for posterity's sake.

I would love to hear feedback from the devs if any of these are achievable during the current reworking the renderer is getting. I would also be interested in learning to code at some point to implement some of these.

1. Alpha channel
   A separate alpha channel would allow for anti-aliasing, pre-rendered motion blur (rotors, explosions), true transparency (fire, explosions, flares, glows etc), overlay animations (beach waves, wind). Perhaps this could also be utilized to somehow make terrain more interesting through a secondary terrain layer that could be essentially brushed over the base tiles. I personally believe this is has the most use out of all the points.

2. Normals channel
   The combination of a normals, depth and alpha with dynamic lighting, which I assume is happening for TS, would allow for relighting of objects in game taking into consideration the objects' shapes, I'm not sure how computationally expensive that is however, I think that's the most ambitious point, with probably the least return for most projects, although it would be very cool to see games with explosions/muzzles that affect their surroundings and Nomad Galaxy with planets that are lit ingame by the stars.

3. Different formats support
   Shps and Westwood PALs are a PITA to work with, the tools are limited, broken and not intuitive. I can see some modders migrating from TS/RA2 to OpenRA once TS is implemented, but it's hard to imagine anyone outside of this community doing so with the current formats.
   Whether this format is 8 or 32 bit doesn't matter much especially since we can use virtually limitless palettes . Although I'm sure some people would like to have more colors to work with.

4. Terrain Creation
   This is a more complex point and I don't have a crystallized thought on this yet, but I would imagine there are better/easier ways to create terrain than fixed cell sizes. This was briefly touched upon in the IRC channel and sparked my interest. Any ideas would probably have to keep it friendly to the mapmakers themselves.
   This is a quite interesting approach https://ppmforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=41860
   And if it can be combined with alpha channels as "brushes"might even be more interesting, but I would love to hear if anyone has ideas.
   Another example, of something completely different is Nomad Galaxy again, while the approach above could be useful, a background image or procedural generators could be even more powerful, especially when you combine that with alpha channels and parallax scrolling for different layers of space "objects".

Warman

Start by reviewing the current renderer rework and how it handles channels, asset formats, and terrain creation. The issue names no files, tests, or entry points; work would be complete only after a specific improvement is scoped, implemented, and validated.