Hi, all.
Glad the new Flash 2.5 will be releasing soon. We are so excited.
We got a complex alpha sorting issue which using current alpha sorting system dose not work with.
I guess that the current sort mode is depending on the distance between meshes and camera.
So the problem occured, we attended to build a tree by  a large mount of leaves. And for each of the leaves are build by bended planes. we have to use texture with alpha for those leaves. I believe this is the most common way to build a complex and detailed tree. All of the leaves, they stacked,
overlayed, intersected.. and might have various pivot center.
And in this case, there is no way to get a correct alpha sorting, unless we use AlphaMaskFilter.
But the hard edges are unpleased.....
I believe that the hard edges are come from the alpha pixels of PNG file. And might related to 
Context3D.setBlendFactors?Context3DBlendFactor.SOURCE_ALPHA?Context3DBlendFactor.ONE_MINUS_SOURCE_ALPHA)
So should we have a try to do something like 3Dmax? using colors for Alpha channel instead of Alpha pixel?

Cheers

Hi Jason, alpha is always an issue when working with the gpu, but there are a few techniques that may solve your problem..."order independent transparency"...but requires some "by hand" rendering and maybe some shader programming.

I'll try to do something on this, but I can not promise to do in the short term...we want to release v2.5 as soon as possible