Particles without using masking

(I had posted this problem on beginners forum on 10/3 but can’t get help there to date)

I want to use the particle effect in my program. I found some tutorials on the nehe.gamedev and gametutorials but tutorials use blending and masking techniques to emulate theparticle effect. No doubt it is one of the fast and easy-to-understand-implement way. But say i used this technique and placed the shower of such particles at certain co-ordinate. Now when i am looking the particles exactly from the front (or position has z-co-ordinate before particles for that matter) everything looks fine. But when position goes at same z-location as that of particle and when view is on the particle they show their real shape… square instead of circle which we were making(circle) by using masking.
I only want the possible solution to this problem or any other method to do particles.
Thank u for reading this…Hope u’ll help me.
ur friend Oglix

Are you drawing all transparent objects last? If not, that could be your problem. And you will need to sort them and draw then in back-to-front order.

or just avoid writing to the depth buffer…

really only works well with particles that are added to the frame buffer…

If you are using OpenGL Points, an not quads to draw your points, you can enable point antialising (GL_POINT_SMOOTH) and this will give you round points instead of square (at least on the cards that I tried --NVidia Geforce + Ati Rage Pro).

Jamie