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# XR7: EarthStrike
# www.xandis.com
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1. sprites\ directory

Sprites are just raw bitmaps with or without transparency
information. In XR7, Sprites are used for GUI elements,
background images and fonts. Explosions and other similar
effects are not created with Sprites, although they could be,
but rather particle systems. The particle image itself though
is considered a sprite and stored in this directory. In fact,
one good place to start improving the game is by making better
looking particles than the two that are used: particle-intro.dds
and particle-game.dds.

All those sprites that require transparency, such as fonts and
particles, are stored as DDS files while the rest are stored
as either BMP or JPG files. The DDS files were created using the
freely available, through the MS DirectX SDK, DxTex utility.

Sprites that are used as textures for models are not stored in 
this directory but rather are stored along with the models in
the models\ directory.

Due to the apparent limitation of 256x256 sized sprites for some
video cards, the large bitmap images were broken up into chunks
for display. 

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