Hello everyone. I was just wondering if someone could help poke holes in a theory and answer a quick question! I'm not a big fan of Z-sorting and I'm working on a 3D game using many 2D images. Each image has special properties and what not, so drawing 1 2D character with 140 triangles can be as demanding as drawing a 3D character with 1000 triangles. This is just a brief background. On to Z idea! Well I was tired of using a point sprite drawing method so I tried using a linear drawing style. As you many of you know, this is where Z sorting becomes a pain. I thought I'd be fine with this but then I thought of floating on water. If the water is transparent, and the spite is alpha blended I'd run into an drawing issue. Depending on the order, I'll have an ugly cut out outline of the characters transparent pixels, or quite simply, the part of the character in the water just isn't drawn. To beat this I just drew the water once before the character and disabled depth buffer writing, and drew it again normally after drawing the character. I was just wondering is this a practical idea? Also I was wondering if there was a way to speed up my character count. I've asked this a million times : D but I dunno maybe there's a new technique or something seeing how fast technology moves. Currently I've taken some advice and move all my textures to one file and drawn the polygons as a triangle list. The list, however, breaks whenever I need to draw an image with stencilling effects. I would've hoped things move much faster than they do though. (Can only draw about 5 characters (150 triangles) at 60fps on a intel integrated card). Feels like I had a better handle on this using OpenGL, although I like the overall presentation using XNA. Give and take I suppose. It would probably help alot if I could somehow stencil inside a texture list then draw all my characters on a single triangle list.

Hey thanks for the input! I from the information gathered my idea shouldn't be too bad!

Thanks Again!