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Okay so I am making an old school RPG-like game. For the map background I am using a tile engine that I wrote myself. Every frame it blits only the tiles that are around the player to the screen, but when I try to blit the tiles that need to have transparency around them (such as a tree), it slows the game down and it lags horribly, but when I blit the same tiles without transparency, the games runs perfectly smooth. Here is my image loading function:


SDL_Surface *load_image( std::string filename, bool ALPHA=false ) {

SDL_Surface *get_img = IMG_Load( filename.c_str() );
SDL_Surface *loaded_img;

if( ALPHA )
loaded_img = SDL_DisplayFormatAlpha( get_img );
else
loaded_img = SDL_DisplayFormat( get_img );
SDL_FreeSurface( get_img );

return loaded_img;

}


So if I put 'true' in for the second argument, then it will load the image with its transparency, and slows the game down. But if I put 'false', then it doesn't load with transparency and my game runs perfectly. Why is this? And what can I do to solve this? Thanks in advance.[/font][/font][/font]

You may want to look into SFML instead of SDL for graphics. SFML is integrated with OpenGL, so it implicilty uses HW acceleration, whereas SDL implicitly does it in SW.

It shouldn't be a hard change assuming you've abstracted out your graphics properly.