You may have noticed previous versions did a weird ugly thing when you overlapped something transparent with something semi-transparent. Â I was using a slightly incorrect alpha blend function (there are about 15 to choose from), I have fixed that. Â I’ve also textured the beam.
Texturing is turning out to be a problem, though.  Photoshop doesn’t really display alpha in the same way OpenGL does (to the best of my knowledge), so after taking about 20 minutes to make what I thought was going to be a really nice, firey-looking laser, I stick it into the game and it looks terrible. Just a really simple gradient from red to orange looks slightly better, which is what is in there now, but it’s still not very good.  Maybe once it’s animated.
I believe I’ve solved the problem standing in my way with the timer code, though, so I should finish that tomorrow.