Despite offering the glow outline as a substitute for doing model transparency, the designers eventually wanted it anyway.  This was the first pass at it, and it was fairly successful.  I had to handle an intermediate accumulation step for drawing so that objects could be sorted between transparency and not, and then transparent objects could be distance sorted.  This first iteration only did a front face pass, so while the transparency effect was achieved, there was no volumetric depth to transparent models.  At the time, this wasn’t seen as an issue, and so transparency did not see improvement for a while after this.

This image was taken on 10/18/12.