Well, for starters, pixel effects do not deal soley with pixels. A particle engine itself is just a physics engine that tells the game it is adding numerous particles, and then updates those particles by affecting them with gravity, heat, deterioration, etc. For example, the DirectX 6 sdk comes with a fireworks example that uses little translucent spheres through alphablending and a particle engine. It looks really cool. Particle Engines are really cool, by the way. Anyway, if you really want it, I do happen to have an example I downloaded long ago and dropped on a zip disk that contains a directx fireworks display, which I have taken the liberty to mail to you.

You might want to check out some articles on www.angelic-coders.com. There was code on their about 16 bit pixel plotting in DirectX
. For 256 color blits for pixels you can lock your surface mem.. then just go to the memory location of the pixel..do your color change and unlock the surface.

-Dl

After playing DXBall and DXBall2, I've noticed that particle effects can really make your game look snazzy. However, I've noticed that particle effects really deal with single pixels and DirectX has no function for single pixel plots. Andre LaMothe covers this in his Dummies book but I don't quite much like how he implements plotting pixels... is there a better way - preferably using RGB(##,##,##) values? Also, does anyone have some simple, straightforward, overdocumented, sesame street code for a particle effect - say for explosions, fireworks, or comet trails?

Thanx

[This message has been edited by Blake (edited July 21, 1999).]