Circles and anti-aliasing

Hello folks,

I should create a tiny program that draws and moves some basic 2D geometric shapes and simple text on the screen. I've explored codes and tutorials for OpenGL and Dirext3D (DX8) and made some excercises with DX. It seems to fit most of my needs successfully. Anyway, if you have any idea about a better or more practical way to carry out 2D shapes and text, I'm glad to hear.

Line Strips and Triangle Strips with DX covers most of the shapes I'd need. I couldn't anyway found any simple way to draw a circle or an arc. Should I just use a Line Strip with a very small interval of the vertexes? Any other ideas?

And second question is about anti-aliasing. How would I get the shapes I draw with DX anti-aliased? They are now a bit too sharp...

That's all at the moment. If you have any ideas or comments or better suggestions - I'm pleased to hear them!

Happy New Year 2003!

Ville

i dont know about dx, but check out my 2d animator program that has moving 2d shaped with anti-aliasing...
www.geocities.com/mp_crew2001

Search the DirectX documentation for "multisampling". Note that it must be supported by your hardware.

An easier way would be to have a textured quad with an alpha channel (make the texture a colour, say, red, and the alpha channel the inverse of a smooth circle).