I feel like an absolute beginner, but still I don't get it.
I have 3 different "layers" of transparent sprites as you can see in the following screenshot:

(click to enlarge)
The black sprites are at y = -256,
the
dust sprites at y = -128-random(64) and
the slope sprites at y = -80.
As you can see, depending on the camera position the moving dust sprites sometimes overlap the black sprites (left shot) or get drawn behind the slope sprites (right shot).
I've read everything about transparency in the manual that I could find, nevertheless I don't get rid of this problem.
I've set camera.clip_far to only 2500 (and camera.clip_near to 15) to "increase" the z-buffer-resolution, I've tried the different sorting algorithms of d3d_entsort and without an ISOMETRIC camera I get similar results.
When I increase the distances between the three layers (by some 100 quants), the sorting problems become less.
Moving the camera, f.i. from -600 to -3600 (with increased clip_far) seems to reduce the amount of sorting issues, too, but shouldn't it be the other way round?
Why do I never see sorting issues in commercial games with many explosions and dust sprites, what's their secret?