I'm not sure what you're talking about. The only issue I see in the screenshot are some minor aliasing artifacts. If those artifacts (the white pixels around the edge of your character) are indeed your problem, then you only need to adjust the alpha mask to give a tighter fit around the source graphic. Don't use antialiasing for your source graphic unless you can provide a 100% perfect alpha mask (Photoshop can do this). Instead, use antialiasing in your alpha mask, that way the edges of your source graphic get 'smoothed' by the mask itself instead of the antialiasing.

Please, for the love of God, use premultiplied alpha!

This blog entry explains it in great detail:
http://home.comcast.net/~tom_forsyth/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BPremultiplied%20alpha%5D%5D

Quote:the problem is, that there are pixels from the objects from behind shining through, since not all polygons are correctly drawn from back to front.

You are confused. The pixel artifacts you are seeing is not due to your object sorting. The pixels are due to an effect called anti-aliasing, where 'soft' (semi-transparent) pixels are inserted along the edge of a 'jagged' line/curve to give a smooth, more natural appearance. In other words, the artifacts you are seeing aren't artifacts at all (in this context), but are an actual part of your sprite image. If you don't believe me, open the image+mask in a graphic editor, and place the image over a black background - you will see the same 'artifacts'.

The reason why you see the artifacts in your scene is because the color image uses anti-aliasing along it's edges. You should only use anti-aliasing on interior parts of the image, and save edge anti-aliasing for the alpha-mask (as 'Prototype' pointed out with his example).

Perhaps you could tell us what graphic editing software you are using so we can be more specific. Or perhaps you could upload your sprite images so we can show you how it needs to be done (I'd do it myself, but I'm lazy right now).

Here's an example:

This is my sprite while I'm editing it in Photoshop:

To the untrained eye, this looks fine, though I can already see the artifacts.
(Note that in this case with this specific red bunny sprite, the standard would be to use a full red square and let the alpha-mask do the rest of the work. However, I'm trying to step through the process in the somewhat the same way you would have.)

Here is the same sprite over a white background:

Looks perfect. The average person would leave it at this.

Here is the same sprite over a black background:

Notice the artifacts that weren't visible in the previous 2 examples. The artifacts are varying levels of pink as needed to give a smooth transition from red to white. From a distance, the artifacts look white, but if you zoom in, you will see that they are actually pink. With your sprite, the artifacts look white, but are actually varying levels of grey (transition from black to white). If they were in-fact pixels from distant objects 'shining' through, then these artifacts would change color as you move objects. I'm pretty sure this is not the case.

I can fix these artifacts in a number of different ways. The quickest fix would be to scale the alpha-mask down by 1 or 2 pixels. In this case, that would cause the edges of the sprite to not be smooth at all. The best fix would be to redesign the alpha-mask so that it does exactly what I need it to do.

[Edited by - swordfish on September 29, 2006 1:45:16 PM]

u will need to create the image better (time consuming usually)
u have to make sure the alpha channel only contains values of 1 (where u want it to appear) or otherwise 0
dont use mipmaps + itll appear correctly