Surfing on the Internet we came across a package called DigitalFX. DigitalFX is a promising blitting / drawing library for Windows 95/98 with DirectX, supporting many visual effects like alpha blending, light effects (darken, lighten) and others. Fast Projects, the authors of DigitalFX, consider their library best suited for making games. We think there are other purposes for this lib as well though, such as multimedia authoring packages and drawing applications.

This library isn't cheap. A user license will cost you $149 and a distribution license will cost you $1499. Yes, that's per product you want to sell. And yes, that's a lot of money. But, is it worth it? That depends of what you want to do! If you just want to make a simple game, without all the fuss of maintaining surfaces, callbacks and difficult gamelogic than DigitalFX isn't your thing. But did you write some games before and do you want to put your graphics on a higher level, than grab for your visa card!

Not everything about DigitalFX is that great though. The product needs to install a bunch of DLL files, which is alright if you like to have 2 more libraries in your program directory. The authors of DigitalFX didn't give the opportunity to link the libraries statically. Furthermore, the documentation isn't that great. The package included a tiny manual, that only discusses the new functions briefly. You won't get the DirectX SDK.

At last we want to show you a screenshot of a game made with the DigitalFX library. Remember: you can do those things as well, but you have to have some experience. Simply getting a library doesn't make you a great programmer! O yeah, you need Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0 to compile your games with DigitalFX.