Thank you for your explanations. That makes it all much clearer. As far as I can see the two pass rendering is the most sensefull method here. Writing a .ddl for a single line of code feels somehow ridiculous. Additionally the anti-aliasing could be a framerate killer and users with an older graphics card could get graphic errors?! Last method seems like a real framerate killer.

Thank you very much for helping me out here, Matt, it's a pitty I can rate you only one time 5 stars.

Edit: Works like a charm...
Code:

---

technique softveg
{
	pass one
	{
		alphaBlendEnable = false;
		alphaTestEnable = true;
		zWriteEnable = true;
	}
	pass two
	{
		alphaBlendEnable = true;
		alphaTestEnable = false;
		zWriteEnable = false;
		zFunc = less;
	}
}

---