Quote: "Spare me the disable z-'anything'- command family, i want depth in my game, which doesn't let particles from far behind look like they are in your face."
Just shows you don't understand the commands, they don't stop depth working. There's no such thing as a perfect transparency solution, there will always be cases where it fails because the depth buffer can only store a single depth per pixel.
For transparency to work, transparent objects must be drawn after solid objects in depth order, so that near transparent objects are drawn last. With particles, having to sort them all based on depth would be quite slow, and there would be strange popping effects for overlapping particles when the order changes, so instead you disable particles' ability to write into the depth buffer, so they are obscured by other objects but cannot obscure each other. This doesn't matter because the particles are transparent objects and so are drawn last, so as long as they read from the depth buffer it doesn't matter if they don't write to it. Depth will still work.
To acheive this in DBPro, use transparency mode 2 or 3 with "disable object zwrite" on the particles.
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