how can c# help in drawing using memory layers concept? - c#

i am facing problem in drawing dynamically in a picture box. i works very good when the drawing objects are few but as the drawing objects increases the response time of my GUI is getting worse and worse, my GUI works very well up to 90 drawing objects but i have to support more than 1000 so this technique didn't work for me.
know i have decided to adopt layers mechanism, i mean i will draw different layers of drawing in memory and then XOR them to load the final image to my display.
the question is "i Can play directly with memory do draw layers using C# (Examples needed?)"
other ideas are also appreciated,
(Drawing objects means the shapes line,circles etc. that i have to draw on my GUI)
thanx in advance

Whenever I do any custom drawing, I make sure that I draw onto a bitmap and then just display the bitmap. You don't want to have to constantly redraw an image if it hasn't changed.

Related

Drawing scatter plot is too slow with GDI

I am drawing a scatter plot with the help of GDI.
But, when there are many lines, it takes about two seconds to draw.
I looked into using SlimDX and SharpDX and utilized their 2D.
It only decreased the time by half. Is there any better tools that I can use to speed up the drawing? I am simply utilizing g.DrawLine. I also heard that there is a tool that lets me draw a scatter on memory and put it on a screen. If you have ideas, it will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
[Are] there any better tools that I can use to speed up the drawing?
First, use g.DrawLines instead of g.DrawLine. This means there is one transition from user code to graphics code instead of one per line.
Second, select a bitmap into the graphics object, draw into that then write the bitmap to the display. See how to draw a line on a image? for an example of drawing a line on a bitmap. This means the lines are drawn once then refreshing the display is a single fast Bit Blit.
Using DirectX ports (e.g. SharpDX, and SlimDX) is possible but probably overkill unless you are dealing with extremely complex scatter plots. These are (generally) more geared toward 3D vector or 2D Bit Blit based graphics.

Best way to draw moving sphere in a smooth way in C#

Hello: I am trying to create an app which will display a moving sphere. App will vary speed and direction. I've tried Adobe Flash but cannot get it smooth. Smoothness is essential in this case. So I am trying C#.
Initially, I can see that this can be implemented by:
1) Creating a PictureBox of a sphere, and using a Timer, change its coordinates. or
2) Using the this.paint function to draw a filled circle, and somehow, with a timer, erasing and redrawing it.
Can someone recommend the best path to take? I'll have a main menu where the user will chose speed/direction/how many etc... and then simply show the "game window" with the moving spheres. Any guidance would be much appreciated.
This is to be displayed on a PC only.
Thanks
-Ed
I just answered a similar question here.
NOTE: Depending on your needs, it is possible to achieve smooth animations under winforms (under certain conditions) though you are responsible for everything. wpf provides an animation framework but wpf is perhaps a milestone harder.
It probably does not matter should you pursue winforms first or WPF. You arguably could learn the basics under winforms then move over to wpf. wpf may require you to learn quite a bit before you can do anything.
Summary
Essentially what this does is to create an offscreen bitmap that we will draw into first. It is the same size as the UserControl. The control's OnPaint calls DrawOffscreen passing in the Graphics that is attached to the offscreen bitmap. Here we loop around just rendering the tiles/sky that are visible and ignoring others so as to improve performance.
Once it's all done we zap the entire offscreen bitmap to the display in one operation. This serves to eliminate:
Flicker
Tearing effects (typically associated with lateral movement)
There is a Timer that is scheduled to update the positions of all the tiles based on the time since the last update. This allows for a more realistic movement and avoids speed-ups and slow-downs under load. Tiles are moved in the OnUpdate method.
If you note in the code for Timer1OnTick I call Invalidate(Bounds); after animating everything. This does not cause an immediate paint rather Windows will queue a paint operation to be done at a later time. Consecutive pending operations will be fused into one. This means that we can be animating positions more frequently than painting during heavy load. Animation mechanic is independent of paint. That's a good thing, you don't want to be waiting for paints to occur. xna does a similar thing
Please refer to my full SO answer complete with sample code
Here are a few hints to get you going:
First you will need to come to a decision about which platform to target: WPF or Winforms.
Then you should know what to move across what; a nice Bitmap or just a circle across an empty background or a Bitmap or a Form with controls on it.
In Winforms both your approaches will work, esp. if you set a circular region see here for an example of that. (The part in the fun comment!)
And yes, a Timer is the way to animate the sphere. Btw, a Panel or even a Label can display an Bitmap just as well as a PictureBox.
For smooth movements make sure to set the Form.Doublebuffered=true, if you move across a Form. If you move across any other control (except a PictureBox or a Label) you will need to subclass it to get access to the DoubleBuffered property!
It is often also a good idea to keep the Location of a moving item in a variable as a PointF and use floats for its speed because this way you can fine grain the speed and Location changes and also the Timer Intervals!

Drawing a lot of lines and other shapes in WinRT App

In my WinRT app I need to draw about 3000 objects on a canvas, where I can translate and zoom the view. Unfortunatley, after adding about 1500 lines to my canvas my Windows 8 App always crashes. What could be the best practice to achieve this?
One solution could be rendering everything on an image (how do I do this?). But then I loose comfort of easy access and editing of every element.
Also my scale and translate is very slow. But since I also need a big overview, it makes no sense to put only the objects of the visible area in the canvas, since on minimum zoom it's still everything and zoomed it's still very laggy cause of add and remove operations.
There are a couple of different things you should employ to have a smooth UX:
Use a Quadtree, whenever you add a shape to your canvas you also put it on your Quadtree. This will be helpful when you will zoom on a portion of the image: you will know what objects are in this portion of the image; you will render them again (against using a cached/pixellated version).
To overcome the potentially lengthy drawing process you could do the following:
display the portion of the cached image overview at the right scale
use a progress indicator to let know the user that the program is working render this portion
when the faint rendering is done, blit it on the screen
A concrete example: Google Maps does that.

Smooth an existing "image" in C#

How can I smooth a Graphics object in C# ? To be more precise, I need to run a smoothing at a very precise moment of my Graphics object generation, on the whole object. The image is coloured.
I am flexible in terms of input classes (Graphics, etc..). I just suggested Graphics at it is a central class for image manipulations in C#.
Graphics.SmoothingMode is out of context for what I need to do and I imagine WU's algorithm only applies to drawing lines in greyscale.
Have a look at the image processing features of AForge.Net. It is an open source framework that includes a lot of useful image processing capabilities. You will find many smoothing filters among them.
I think you used the wrong words to describe your problem. Anti aliasing refers to (as Hand mentioned) the point in time when individual objects are drawn for the first time. For instance, when drawing a diagonal line on an empty surface.
You already have an image, and you want that image to be smoothed. I suggest you detect edges in the image using a standard algorithm, then smooth those edges. I am not familiar with the exact process to do this myself, sadly.

XNA 2D Shaders and SpriteSortMode

So I've been trying to wrap my head around shaders in 2D in XNA.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb313868(v=xnagamestudio.31).aspx
This link above stated that I needed to use SpriteSortMode.Immediate, which is a problem for me because I have developed a parallax system that relies on deferred rendering (SpriteSortMode.BackToFront).
Can someone explain to me the significance of SpriteSortMode in shaders, if Immediate is mandatory, anything I can do to maintain my current system, and anything else in general to help me understand this better?
In addition, my game runs off of multiple SpriteBatch.Begin()/End() calls (for drawing background, then the game, then the foreground and HUD and etc). I've noticed that the Bloom example does not work in that case, and I am guessing it has something to do with this.
In general, I've been having some trouble understanding these concepts. I know what a shader is and how it works, but I don't know how it interacts with XNA and what goes on there. I would really appreciate some enlightenment. :)
Thanks SO!
The sort mode will matter if you are attempting to do something non-trivial like render layered transparency or make use of a depth buffer. I'm going to assume you want to do something non-trivial since you want to use a pixel shader to accomplish it.
SpriteSortMode.Immediate will draw things in exactly the order of the draw calls. If you use another mode, SpriteBatch will group the draw calls to the video card by texture if it can. This is for performance reasons.
Keep in mind that every time you call SpriteBatch.Begin you are applying a new pixel shader and discarding the one previously set. (Even if the new one is just SpriteBatch's standard pixel shader that applies a Tint color.) Additionally, remember that by calling SpriteBatch.End you are telling the video card to execute all of the current SpriteBatch commands.
This means that you could potentially keep your existing sorting method, if your fancy pixel shaders are of limited scope. In other words, draw your background with one Effect and then your foreground and characters with another. Each Begin/End call to SpriteBatch can be treated separately.
If your goal is to apply one Effect (such as heat waves or bloom) to everything on the screen you have another option. You could choose to render all of your graphics onto a RenderTarget that you create instead of directly to the video card's backbuffer. If you do this, at the end of your rendering section you can call GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null) and paint your completed image to the backbuffer with a custom shader that applies to the entire scene.
I'm not one hundred percent sure on how much the sprite sorting mode effects shaders, i would think it would vary depending on what you were using the shader for.
as for bloom if you're using multiple begin and ends (which you really want to minimise if you can). you can create a render target the size of the screen, draw everything as you are now. then at the very end, take that render target back (using graphicsdevice.SetRenderTarget(null);) then draw your full screen render target (at 0,0 position) with the bloom shader, that way you will bloom the entire scene, regardless of the components of the scene using various sort modes.

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