The Use of The DirectX 7 Sprite Engine
by it's creator
Guy Malix

This is the table of contents thingy that tells you what is covered and in what order
•	Initializing the Graphics Engine
•	Structure of the Engine
•	Properties of the background
•	Initializing a background using by filename
•		Routine Calls
•	Initializing a TileBackground
•	How Things Work
•	Properties of the Sprites
•	Initializing Sprites
•		Routine Calls
•	How to use the textground
•	How to Use the TextWindow

Initializing the Graphics Engine
	If you are using the provided sdk project then your practically already done.  Just look at the form's load code, and locate the line that says something similar to "SpriteEng.InitializeSystem 640,480" or something like that.  the two numbers are.. yup you guessed it... the dimensions of the screen.  That's all you have to do to initialize the engine... however to use it is another story.

Structure of the Engine
	The engine is set into three backgrounds, 40 sprites, a text ground, a temp ground, and a text window ground.  Rendered in the following order, Back Ground, Sprites on background, Midground, sprites on midground, foreground, sprites on foreground, text window, then text.  In easier understood terms it displays/renders everything from back to front.  Placing the things in the back first and placing the things in the front last.

Properties of the Background
	There are three backgrounds, the "Background", the "MidGround", and the "ForeGround".  Each of the grounds have information stored in an array defined as an overlay.  The data held within the overlay is as follows:

    ViewPortX 'Width of the viewing window
    ViewPortY  'Height of the viewing window
    CornerPosX  'the X of Where the viewing window is
    CornerPosY  'the Y of Where the viewing window is
    ViewingArea As RECT  'is set by the previous four points and is past in a command later
    ToScreen As RECT 'Where on the screen to blt can be used to scale the background
    width - width of the original bitmap
    height- height of the origianl bitmap
    visible As Boolean  - Tells whether or not it will be rendered when display screen is called.

	At the start, no backgrounds are initialized, but the overlay data is.  All three of the backgrounds start with an initial visible value of false. Meaning that they are not displayed during the displayScreen routine.  Witch is good, because if visible was set to true without the background being set the engine would crash.

Initializing a Background Using "by filename"
	There are certain steps that I recomend when initializing a background and here is the procedure I use to initialize a background with this engine:

	SpriteEng.SetBackGroundByFileName BackGroundNumber, Filename, filesizeX, filesizeY
	SpriteEng.SetBackgroundToScreen BackGroundNumber, left, top, right, bottom
	SpriteEng.SetBackGroundVisibility BackGroundNumber, True
	SpriteEng.SetPortionBackGround BackGroundNumber, left, top, Corner
	SpriteEng.SetPortionBackGround BackGroundNumber, width, height, View

	Those five steps will initialize a background... of you would have to put actual values into the place of everything.  I'm supposing you want me to tell you what goes where... well.. ok.

	BackgroundNumber: This is either, "BackGround", "MidGround", or "ForeGround"
	Filename: is the location of the bitmap without the ".bmp"
	FileSizeX and Filesizey: hmm... duh? it's the size of the bitmap in pixels
	-In the function SetBackGroundToScreen-
		left: the X coordinate closest to the left side of the screen
		top: the Y coordinate closest to the top of the screen
		right: the X coordinate closest to the right side of the screen
		bottom: the Y coordinate closest to the bottom of the screen
		An example:
X coorpar1 Th rparf4IAt the start, no b side of idctlb side of idctlb side of idctlb side of idctlb