I've been doing some programming for games and other things in VB, and recently was looking into making graphics transparent in Visual Basic. I already found the BitBlt method of using two images. This works pretty well for me, but suffers from the obvious disadvantage of having double the images to make it work.
The other day I found the drawiconex function, which draws an icon image as an icon on a form the same way bitblt does, only with the transparencies of said icon preserved. So it'd seem that if I used a program like Microangelo to make some custom sized icons, then used drawiconex to draw said icons, I'd be able to do transparency with just one image.
My question is would there be significant disadvantages to this, as compared to the Bitblt way (IE speed, or features only Bitblt could probably provide to me). And, are there any other good standard methods out there for using a drawing method to create a transparent image?
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