Scaling Textures

[moleary]

I'm playing with textures some and am confused about some of the features. First, when I apply a texture to a surface, the texture is not stretched to fit the surface. Instead, the suface seems to broken into many squares. Is this right? Is the surface subdivided in this fashion? Secondly, if I do want to have a single rectangular surface be covered by the texture, how do I accomplish this? Finally, how do I interpret the value returned from Texture::ScaleFactor. It returns a value between 0.001 and 1,000,000 to scale the texture by. Does this mean the texture is not scaled vertically and horizontally, but equally in both directions? Also, how do I use this return value to get the equal effect in my own viewer after extracting this data from the API?

Thanks for any help!