Software renderer and alpha

[N.K.]

Hello there.

I've looked around the forum, but so far, I've found nothing about this.

I'm working on a tile based 2D engine using Irrlicht. On machines with working 3D acceleration, I'll use the OpenGL driver, but I'd like to make the system to use the software renderer (the old one, not Burning's Video) when there's no 3D hardware available.

And now, I've ran into a problem. When I display an image via draw2DImage, and set the alpha value to anything less than 255, it works great with the GL renderer, but with the software renderer, it does nothing, the image is completely opaque.

I'm sure it's my fault, since the software renderer displays transparent things correctly in the Irrlicht demos.

(By the way, the image is in PNG format, using a solid background color, so there's no alpha channel.)

How can I make it work correctly?

Thanks in advance.

[hybrid]

The old SW renderer only works with 16bit textures, where at most 1bit is for alpha. So only completely opaque or completely transparent is possible. Use burningsvideo for the rest.

[N.K.]

Thanks for your reply.

In that case, I'll try to play around with Burning's software renderer.