Homebrew development on the Wii console is still in a relatively fledgeling state. With its lack of development libraries and other tools, it's no small wonder why so many people are a bit hesitant about starting their own homebrew projects on the Wii platform.

Fortunately, developers Chaosteil and Feesh! recently came up with a new C++-based sprite library which introduces a simple and fun way to develop Wii homebrew. Entitled "libwiisprite", the library makes use of GX for all its graphical operations, allowing the console's GPU to handle all the accelerated graphics.

The current build of libwiisprite is considered the semi-stable version which allows most of the proposed functionalities of the library. However, image support is only extended towards the PNG with alpha format.

Here's a rundown of the latest features included in libwiisprite v0.1.8b:

* Now Sprites have SetTransparency() and GetTransparency() methods. It is documentated in the documentation.
* The spritetest example also got updated, you can now set transparency with the A and B buttons.

For more information regarding the library, you can check out the online documentation, accessible through a link on the source site.