I''m sure youve all debated it before but Im new here so i was wondering what you all though about isometric maps being rendered in Direct 3D textures. I would seem to be easier to do changes in elevation and scaling, but do you really see a performance boost? thanks steve

Please read the faq, you''ll see that you should check previous posts first..
Using Direct3D should not give you any advantage, only for alphablending that is still not implemented in ddraw, but probably will be in dx8

If you look though the articles on this site there is an article regarding this matter, I think it''s called "using d3d to draw 2d maps" or something simular.

all of the basic work has been done for you, and it also has 4 example programs with it.

&ltShamelessPlug> The article (Using Direct3D for 2D Tile Rendering) is here. </ShamelessPlug>

Seriously, this topic has been debated to death (which doesn''t mean I don''t still get email about it!). Since the messageboardd search feature seems to be broken, here is a synopsis:

• For a simple, flat isometric map, I''d say that there isn''t much benefit to using D3D triangles over regular DirectX blits/bltfasts. It really varies by graphics card which is faster.
  
• Heightmapping is definitely easier with D3D. It maps textures to odd tile shapes, saving you from either prerendering a LOT of tiles, or writing a custom triangle plotting routine in software.
  
• Alpha blending (additive and subtractive) and other effects are quite a bit easier when 3D hardware does it for you. On some older cards, a hand-crafted ASM routine is faster - but not on any serious games card post Voodoo 1 (in my experience).
  

D3D isn''t the perfect solution (there is no such thing). The point of my article really was to try and get people to think of "3D routines" as little more than fast triangle blitting routines (which is all that they are, unless you have a TnL card). You can use DirectDraw outside of BeginScene and EndScene, and TLVERTEX structures let you work in screen coordinates (no matrices!), so effectively you have a prewritten - fast - 2D API waiting for you.