draw_sprite(3alleg4)

💖 draw_sprite 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to the Allegro manual (yes, the 3alleg4 on the end of the name is just the section vibe, iykyk). This function is literally the glow-up moment where your sprite stops being pixels-in-a-bitmap and starts being on the screen. no cap. 🦋✨

✨ NAME ✨

draw_sprite — draws a copy of the sprite onto the destination bitmap. Allegro game programming library.

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

#include <allegro.h>

void draw_sprite(BITMAP *bmp, BITMAP *sprite, int x, int y);

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

So what it does: it draws a copy of the sprite bitmap onto the destination bitmap, at the position you tell it. That's it, that's the whole job, and it ate. 💅

Here's the tea though — it's almost the same as this:

blit(sprite, bmp, 0, 0, x, y, sprite->w, sprite->h)

...BUT with one iconic little twist: it uses a masked drawing mode where transparent pixels get skipped entirely. Which means the background image shows right on through the masked parts of your sprite. The sprite doesn't sit on a big ugly rectangle of void, it just floats. main character energy fr fr. 🌈

And how do you mark a pixel as "transparent, please ignore"? Two ways, depending on your color depth:

• a zero in 256-color modes 🍓
• bright pink for truecolor data — that's maximum red, maximum blue, and zero green 💗

Little example, because seeing it is believing:

BITMAP *spaceship;
...
draw_sprite(screen, spaceship, x, y);

Now, speed check ⚡ — if the GFX_HW_VRAM_BLIT_MASKED bit is set in the gfx_capabilities flag, that means your current driver supports hardware accelerated sprite drawing whenever the source image is a video memory bitmap or a sub-bitmap of the screen. This is extremely fast, so when that flag is set it may genuinely be worth storing some of your more frequently used sprites in an offscreen portion of the video memory. obsESSED. 🔥

⚠️ Warning: if the hardware acceleration flag is not set, draw_sprite() will not work correctly when used with a sprite image in system or video memory — so in that case the latter must be a memory bitmap. Don't skip this one bestie, it will ruin your whole day. 💀

One more little special case that's lowkey kind of magic 🧚: Allegro generally doesn't support graphics of mixed color depths, but as a special case this function can be used to draw 256-color source images onto truecolor destination bitmaps. Which means you can use palette effects on specific sprites while you're inside a truecolor program. palette effects on just some sprites?? yes. slay. 👑

🫶 SEE ALSO 🫶

• draw_sprite_v_flip(3alleg4)
• draw_trans_sprite(3alleg4)
• draw_lit_sprite(3alleg4)
• draw_gouraud_sprite(3alleg4)
• stretch_sprite(3alleg4)
• rotate_sprite(3alleg4)
• draw_character_ex(3alleg4)
• draw_rle_sprite(3alleg4)
• draw_compiled_sprite(3alleg4)
• masked_blit(3alleg4)
• blit(3alleg4)
• bitmap_mask_color(3alleg4)
• exsprite(3alleg4)

and that's the whole page, bestie!! this was Allegro, version 4.4.3, and the page itself goes by draw_sprite(3alleg4). go forth and mask those pixels 💜🌸✨