Question

I’m working on a 2D game using C++ and DirectX9 and I’ve got a decent amount of it working. As of now I have it using sprite.draw for everything: the player, the backgrounds (tiled with for loops), the walls, the HUD, etc. Then I started questioning if how I was drawing the game was the best way to go. Are there major differences between using sprites and using textured primitives? Is there a way to just set each pixel individually from my own functions, and would that be practical? It’d be nice if I could later add lighting and alpha blending, and I’d be up for coding that myself if it doesn’t slow the program down too much. I just want to get things straight right away and make sure there’s nothing I’m missing.

Answer 1

Sprite drawing is fine, the advantage of it is that it handles all the texture coordinates for you and probably is also hardware accelerated.

Is there a way to just set each pixel individually from my own functions, and would that be practical

It is possible, but not practical. The cpu cannot process so much pixels at each frame, and neither its buses are wide enough to send all of them every frame. Thats what the graphic card is for, it is much faster with pixel processing and has much wider buses to the display.

It’d be nice if I could later add lighting and alpha blending, and I’d be up for coding that myself if it doesn’t slow the program down too much

It is possible, with built in functions for lights and alpha blending, and you can even code it yourself (its called a shader).