guys did they realy do real time alpha blending in age of empires? its too time consuming right? i did my own but takes too much time for a scrolling screen which ya have to change the tiles every few secs. even if u use side buffering for the screen it takes a lot of time... so how could we do real time alpha blending actually(usin'' directdiraw mayb)??? well for the tiles we can prerender the tiles before the game starts but how bout shadows of the objects? they r moving right? no matter if we need to re-render the background tiles or not... any one knows how to handle this?