I spent nearly a week programming this in Mathematica (v.5, as I recall) around 2001 for half of Figure 4.10 in my book Pattern classification (2nd ed). At that time, there was no Opacity[] functionality either. I believe mine is the first book to include such a figure. I am so glad Wolfram has included this functionality, and thank Chip Hurst for his contributions to it. It looks great!