Ok, I was following the 2D rendering in D3D article on this site. After a little tweaking of MSVC (and eventually getting Visual Assist...gotta love them tooltips!), I got the whole thing to work, all the way to the end of the article. There's just one problem: for the texture, I used a monochrome bitmap with a white background and the name Josh in cursive in black (lack of inspiration?). The bitmap renders on the panel with a red background and black lettering. I'm running in 16 bit, so there shouldn't be a palette problem...any suggestions? [EDIT] Oh yeah, here's the snippet of code where the "sprite" and texture are loaded; this is the only place I can see a problem potentially cropping up (it's basically the PostInit() from the article): void PostInit(float fWindowWidth, float fWindowHeight) { D3DXMATRIX Ortho2D; D3DXMATRIX Identity; PANELVERTEX* pVertices = NULL; D3DXMatrixOrthoLH(&Ortho2D, fWindowWidth, fWindowHeight, 0, 1); D3DXMatrixIdentity(&Identity); g_lpD3DDevice->SetTransform(D3DTS_PROJECTION, &Ortho2D); g_lpD3DDevice->SetTransform(D3DTS_WORLD, &Identity); g_lpD3DDevice->SetTransform(D3DTS_VIEW, &Identity); float PanelWidth = .5, PanelHeight = .5; g_lpD3DDevice->CreateVertexBuffer(4 * sizeof(PANELVERTEX), D3DUSAGE_WRITEONLY, D3DFVF_PANELVERTEX, D3DPOOL_MANAGED, &g_lpD3DVertexBuffer); g_lpD3DVertexBuffer->Lock(NULL, 4*sizeof(PANELVERTEX), (byte**)&pVertices, D3DLOCK_NOSYSLOCK | D3DLOCK_DISCARD); pVertices[0].color = pVertices[1].color = pVertices[2].color = pVertices[3].color = D3DCOLOR_XRGB(255, 0, 0); pVertices[0].x = pVertices[3].x = -PanelWidth / 2.0f; pVertices[1].x = pVertices[2].x = PanelWidth / 2.0f; pVertices[0].y = pVertices[1].y = PanelHeight / 2.0f; pVertices[2].y = pVertices[3].y = -PanelHeight / 2.0f; pVertices[0].z = pVertices[1].z = pVertices[2].z = pVertices[3].z = 1.0f; pVertices[1].u = pVertices[2].u = 1.0f; pVertices[0].u = pVertices[3].u = 0.0f; pVertices[0].v = pVertices[1].v = 0.0f; pVertices[2].v = pVertices[3].v = 1.0f; g_lpD3DVertexBuffer->Unlock(); g_lpD3DDevice->SetRenderState(D3DRS_LIGHTING, false); D3DXCreateTextureFromFileEx(g_lpD3DDevice, "josh.bmp", NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, D3DFMT_A8R8G8B8, D3DPOOL_MANAGED, D3DX_DEFAULT, D3DX_DEFAULT, NULL, NULL, NULL, &g_lpD3DTexture); g_lpD3DDevice->SetRenderState(D3DRS_ALPHABLENDENABLE, TRUE); g_lpD3DDevice->SetRenderState(D3DRS_SRCBLEND, D3DBLEND_SRCALPHA); g_lpD3DDevice->SetRenderState(D3DRS_DESTBLEND, D3DBLEND_INVSRCALPHA); g_lpD3DDevice->SetTextureStageState(0, D3DTSS_ALPHAOP, D3DTOP_MODULATE); } -Normie "But time flows like a river... and history repeats." ... So...what about beaver dams? Edited by - normie on July 24, 2001 2:18:02 PM Edited by - normie on July 24, 2001 2:20:29 PM

hey, that''s great, thanks for the help...one question, though: why doesn''t it just take the white background from the bmp when applying the texture? is there a way to do that? or, perhaps, is something wrong with the bmp? (just so you know, I made it with plain old Windows Paint... 64x64, nothing changed except the black lettering)

-Normie

"But time flows like a river... and history repeats."
...
So...what about beaver dams?

well, damn, that makes a lot of sense...
few more tests and experiments and I can work on programming some wrappers of my own...or maybe i''ll just fall back on ID3DXSprite.

thanks for the help :D

-Normie