An example of putting some value into a shader before some smart person (/me looks at dpjudas) implements proper uniform passing.
Can be used for funky appearance/disappearance animations and various other conditional things.
Can be used to disconnect procedural model texture animations (or fires, or whatever) from the global timer and give them a random seed/time offset.
Not sure if this is applicable to other color-related values, but should work with any double that gets passed to the shader.
Not sure if it will work for a model because I remember models don't work properly with translucency at all, and putting RenderStyle Normal probably resets alpha to 1.
Not tested, but this approach may as well work with alpha on linedefs. This really depends on whether the engine tries to act smart and reset alpha to 1.0 for one-sided lines.
Overall, it's 7am here, sleep time
