SDL has four blend modes, SDL_BLENDMODE_NONE, SDL_BLENDMODE_BLEND, SDL_BLENDMODE_ADD, and SDL_BLENDMODE_MOD.
SDL_BLENDMODE_NONE isn't terribly useful for Solarus so we can ignore it.
Solarus source code appears to always use BLEND already, which makes sense.
My desire is to be able to have some surfaces specify the ADD and MOD modes.
ADD is useful for creating brightly shining effects which lighten and color things under them, without washing them out or making them look hazy. Using a semitransparent sprite or surface by itself would cause the sprite underneath to lose some of its clarity.
If you wanted a particularly bright special effect, it would destroy the clarity of the scene beneath it, whereas an ADD blended surface would allow more of the detail to show through.
It would look better particularly when a dark and light colored object are beneath it, as the dark object would would be lit proportional to its original color.
A simple BLEND effect would cause the darker object to seem to be lit more, due to the BLEND surface partly replacing the scene, rather than adding to it.
Similarly MOD can be used to darken a scene, and add really rich vibrant color to it, without degrading image quality. This is fairly easy to demonstrate, using a screenshot from another SNES game.
At the top we have a BLEND mode style layering, with a blue color, at 75% opacity. It... doesn't look so great, and I wasn't able to make it much darker than that without the image turning more black than blue. Below that is a MOD style layer, which darkens the image with a rich blue color, without making the scene hazy, and it looks like a nice nighttime effect.
With the MOD blendmode, one could make an active day and night cycle by rendering a surface with different colors for different times of day, or shadows which darken sprites under them, without making them look smoky (like what happens with a black or gray semitransparent BLEND shadow)
As far as I could locate, the git src only sets the blendmode twice, so it seems like adding a blendmode property to the solarus drawable class and passing that as an argument, should work... But that's only as far as I could find. I'm sure Christopho knows the source better than I.
Anyway, that's my argument for why it would be a decent feature to have.
