I am trying to use DirectDraw7 to program a game (the details are unimportant), and I already have it set up to make black (0) transparent, for non-rectangular sprites. However, for some reason, DirectDraw... oh dammit I forget the word... I know this word dammit! OK, well anyway, DirectDraw smooths out the edges. For example, if I have a white circle, it makes some pixels around it grey-ish, so it looks nicer against a black background (for an extra 2 points, can someone remind me what this is called?). So, I want to use a range of colors for my transparent key, for example 0 to something that is just slightly lighter than black. All of the tutorial I found about transparent blitting tell you how to set up a transparent color key, but none explain how to use a range for it. In the DirectDraw SDK docs, it says I must use the DDCKEY_COLORSPACE flag, but doing this crashes my program. I think there is more stuff I have to set up somewhere, but I have no idea where. Can someone toss me a bone, and explain how to do this (in VB preferably, since that is what I am using). Thanks a lot --- krez (krezisback@aol.com)

you have to fill out a DDCOLORKEY struct

typedef struct _DDCOLORKEY{
DWORD dwColorSpaceLowValue; //from
DWORD dwColorSpaceHighValue; //to
} DDCOLORKEY, FAR* LPDDCOLORKEY;

then use SetColorKey function

HRESULT SetColorKey(
DWORD dwFlags,
LPDDCOLORKEY lpDDColorKey
);

oops!
sorry about that i guess i should have read the question a little better

quote:Original post by Invader X
No, no, Load Runner, that code should be what he needs since I''m sure he can modify it for VB. The DDCOLORKEY structure has a value for the lowest value to colorkey and the highest value to colorkey. Every value in between will be colorkeyed.
So, if you set the low value to 0 and the high value to slightly lighter than black your antialiased (is that the word you were looking for?) circle should blit fine.

ah yes, antialiased... i think i must have killed that brain cell, because i KNOW i knew it at one time
anyways, i know how to set up a color key, but this makes my program crash. i have the feeling that i didn''t set something, or am missing a flag somewhere... it works if key.hi=key.low, but if they are a range it crashes. do i have to initialize DirectDraw differently somehow? or maybe the surface that uses this key?

--- krez (krezisback@aol.com)