Quote Originally Posted by Sly
There was never a DrawText method in DirectDraw. You have two options:
:arrow: Get the DC and use the GDI TextOut. Yes, very slow.
:arrow: Draw your own bitmap font, similar to that described by Crisp_N_Dry. A lot faster, but more work for you initially.
Cool, thanks for the replies guys =D

I only found out about DrawText on MSDN. It mentions it's a IDirectDrawSurface method, but they missed it out?

EDIT: The problem I have is that text is a major part of the game, as it's a MMORPG, and needs to support many languages including possibly japanese and chinese. So I think I need to stick with GDI for now. Maybe later I might experiment with dynamically populating the character surfaces by running through the entire character set. Whilst that's fine for english and latin characters, it's not for the 1,000s of japanese ones TrueType fonts are a bugger as well, different char sizes