   Haaf Game Engine - How to draw transparent sprites?
  Hi all,I'm new to the Haaf's Game Engine. There seems to be no way to draw a transparent sprite without having a texture created from a properly formatted PNG image. Is a PNG image needed to draw transparent sprites? If so, then what free programs can I use to convert other graphic formats to the correct PNG format? Thanks.   
  Well the first thing that comes to mind is The Gimp. It's a free image editing package, and would work as a simple converter too. You may have to edit in the alpha if you're using a format that doesn't support it already ( such as converting BMP -> PNG, you'd only have alpha that you added manually in the GIMP ).Also, if you just want ON,OFF masking-type transparency, you can do that with plain BMPs by setting a specific color ( like magenta RGB(255,0,255) ) as the transparency mask in the image. Then, in the game code, you can lock the texture with the Texture_Lock() function. This will give you a pointer to the texture image data. Then just loop through the pixels in the texture, and set the alpha to 0 whenever the color is equal to the transparency mask color.Hope that helps.   ;  I've tried the Texture_Lock() method and it worked! Had no idea it was actually that simple.   