I am transitioning from WinForms/XNA to WPF/SlimDX because:
a) all of the benefits of WPF over
WinForms (but learning curve = ouch!)
b) I would like to have multiple
SlimDX viewports attached to Panels.
XNA has 1 "game" screen.
c, last and least) DirectX 10 support
All of my previous XNA code is in C#. I am having trouble figuring out how to port this over to SlimDX and WPF on a high level. I have searched like crazy. The closest I have found are:
1) http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=507941
Many articles point to this discussion, however it is incomplete and I can't figure out the XAML, and I get device errors after attaching all of the _slimDXDevice and Window1 events that were left out.
2) http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/D3DImage.aspx
This article assumes the user is porting C++. I am porting XNA code which is very close to MDX code.
If I could get to the point where I have a WPF form with a custom SlimDX driven viewport that was just a blue box, I could go from there. In XNA I rendered many separate RenderTargets and placed them all over the screen, now I want to attach them to controls. But first, just 1 blue box! :D
Any ideas? I feel that this is either simple or that there's some "cookie cutter" code that I'm missing. Greatly appreciated!
You can look at the sample now. It's just been checked in to our repository, so you'll need to use SVN to get it (or wait until we ship the Feb 2010 release):
http://code.google.com/p/slimdx/source/detail?r=1356
D3DImage is the class you want to use. Even though the codeproject tutorial is C++, it is very applicable to SlimDX and WPF.
All you have to do with your SlimDX, is run your code normally, but DO NOT run a Present(...) on your device or swap chain. At the point where you would put a Present(...), do a D3DImage.SetBackBuffer(...) and send your SlimDX surface's ComPointer property to it. Then do D3DImage.AddDirect(...) and you now have D3D composited in WPF.
Also, make sure you create a IDirect3DDevice9Ex or else your performance will be terrible in anything but XP!
I recently was messing around with D3DImage and SlimDX and didn't find it too difficult to get it working (with DirextX9). I have some code at my home pc that I'll post later, but it's pretty similar to the code in the links provided.
I was never able to get it working with a higher version of directx though. Jeremiah has a nice blog post about using a directx9 device as a link between directx 10/11/d2d and the D3DImage, but I couldn't get it working with Slimdx. I didn't put a whole lot of effort into though as directx9 did what I needed it to do and I kind of wanted it to work on XP.
Related
How do you put a Windows Form Application on top off everything on your screen?
Just setting the topmost-property isn't enough when you're running fullscreen games.
If anyone has a solution for good old Forms i'll also be happy
I've seen many posts on this forum that say it's impossible but i know it's not couse i've seen alot of apps (fraps, teamspeak overlay, xfire, etc) that does this.
If you want to use a graphics library to display something always on screen, you may want to start here on SO. There are wrapper libraries available like OpenTK for OpenGL. If you want to go the DirectX route you'll need to load in the C++ libraries and access them using P/Invoke. There's a good tutorial to start with on msdn. Wrappers for DirectX also exist in the form of SharpDX.
i'm totally new to SlimDX and WPF, but i need to create a multiple images in my application and one of them need to be a 3d visualizator of a point render, something like this:
http://img600.imageshack.us/img600/5879/6a00d83452464869e2017ee.gif
I found i can use SlimDX to use DirectX by C# instruction in my application, writing the result in a D3DImage component.
After some tries i made visual studio 2012 to recoignize that D3DImage (for some reason i needed to restart windows to made it work) but i don't know a few things:
How i can initialize a DirectX window inside that D3DImage? I really can't find any example or source code. All the examples i can find (like the 3 litte examples on SlimDX) are out of the WPF context
Where i can find some good documentation about SlimDX? The GameDev community seems some kinda bugged and i can't post anything (maybe because i'm not paying) and i can't find anything anywhere! How i'm supposed to learn that?
Not a single one of the SlimDX examples from the SVN can compile. I always got some reference error with the SlimDX library (empty path) and even re-importing from the correct path doesn't solve it
This is driving my crazy D:
I feel your pain. I haven't be working to much with the D3D stuff in SlimDX for lack of a reason to do so, But I have been playing around with DirectSound and DirectInput, So i'll tell you what i've figured out.
First Bullet:
I'm not sure initializing a D3D Window inside of an image is going to work. If you're using Windows Forms as your base, SlimDX includes a RenderForm or some such thing that subclasses Windows.Forms, and provides a decent amount of functionality. I still haven't figured it out for WPF, even though there's supposed to be a sample for that.
Second Bullet: Documentation is difficult to come by. There's some stuff on the site, and some stuff here, but what's really been helpful is the MSDN Reference for DirectX. SlimDX Mirrors the structures pretty well, and you can find out a lot by reading it. It DOES take a bit of conversion, because the DirectX reference is C++.
Third Bullet: Same problem. Never was able to figure out why.
Hope that helps a bit.
My goal is to gain a better understanding of the characteristics of C#, and become more comfortable creating simple apps. I am fairly competent with Flash (Actionscript 3), and found an old Tic-Tac-Toe game I'd written. I started wondering about porting this code into a C# application. Not knowing much about C#, I'm wondering how difficult the migration would be.
On the one hand, the underlying game logic is syntactically similar, and therefore would be easy to port.
However, as far as the graphics are concerned, I don't even know where to begin. So far, I've only exposed myself to Windows Forms and Console apps in C#.
I'm wondering if these Flash concepts have similar analogs in C#, or if the procedures and syntax are radically different:
Placing graphic elements on a stage
Rendering lines from start/end coordinates
Event listeners on movie clips
Swapping the image inside a graphic element (or, in my Flash version, nextFrame() in a movie clip)
You may want to try developping your little game using Silverlight. Silverlight applications, coded using C# and Xaml, are pretty similar in form with flash applications, and you should find everything you need without trouble.
So I suggest you download the Silverlight SDK (free) and give it a try.
Firstly, Flash is to WPF (close enough) as ActionScript is to C#.
The WPF/Silverlight model is much more similar to Flex that it is to Flash. Everything is added to the UI tree as a object, even lines.
Likewise, adding event handlers to controls (like a button click) can be done in the "code behind" (the code that lives with the view), but the recommendation is to use the MVVM pattern. If you are new to the concepts of separation of concerns and unit testing, feel free to start with the simpler "code behind" method.
While WPF and Silverlight are very similar, I'd recommend starting with Silverlight as the SDK and available samples are richer. You can easily move onto WPF later on (though porting an application from Silverlight to WPF is not automatic).
Swapping images, as you mentioned, would be done via "Visual States" in Silverlight (or possibly changing the image reference, which is more "hacky").
Have a look at the following links to get started:
Learn # Silverlight.net
Silverlight on MSDN
Shapes and Drawing (Silverlight)
If you're looking specifically to do games and the like, you may wish to look into the free XNA framework. However, there will be differences as Flash gives you far more ability to "set up" things beforehand and modify them.
Placing graphic elements on a stage
If you go the XNA route, you will be drawing sprites using the spritebatch, you tell them where and how to draw and that's where they will go
Rendering lines from start/end coordinates
In windows forms you can do this via a simple System.Drawing call, however if you wish to do this in XNA, you will either have to make a 1 pixel square and stretch/rotate it to what you want, or use 3d primitives (Though this will limit you to a 1 pixel line)
Event listeners on movie clips
Look into delegates, but there isn't really an equivalent for movie clips to my knowledge
Swapping the image inside a graphic element (or, in my Flash version, nextFrame() in a movie clip)
This is fairly simple, depending on what you mean. If you want to, say, animate a sprite. You can do this by moving the source rectangle or changing the texture of the spritesheet. If you mean the screen as a whole, this is mostly handled for you provided you use the spritebatch. In windows forms you'll have to do more of it yourself, but the base concepts are the same.
Overall it's not that bad, but if that doesn't sound appealing check out Silverlight. It's basically C# styled flash so you may find the transition easier.
Good luck and hope this helps.
I'm currently working at a application that helps people understand how to do there job. You can see it as a personal coach that guides them trough all the steps they need to do that no normal person could keep remembering.
In my previous application we had the ability to show the user up to 4 pictures (what proves to be more then enough). The application would load the data and see how many pictures where in every instruction and then sort out the picture in the best fitting way without messing up the scale and resolution of the pictures. This all was done with GDI+ and worked very well.
Ofc, change is something that always happens, my bosses came up with some great ideas. So they want to be able to see movies on the screen, animated gif's, 3D models that can rotate or animate. So I think we had pushed GDI+ to it's limits and it's time to look for something different.
I have heard and readed about WPF but have no experience with it. Is it even possible to do all what I ask in WPF? And what about the old picture-merging thing I wrote, can we also get it done in wpf? I tried to make some things working but I didn't went as smooth as I hoped.
I'm also concerned about the fact that the interface needs to be dynamic, the one moment it should be showing picture with some text above it, the other moment it should be showing another text with a video under it.
I would love to hear some opinions here and if you got some other suggestions I should look into pls tell me. Thnx in advance
PS: If WPF is the choice, should I convince my boss to change to .net 4.0?
Although my answer can be termed subjective, I find WPF better than GDI+ anyday. You can do everything you can in WPF which you have done/could do in GDI+ (apart from pure games/game engines). If you can afford the steep learning curve of WPF, I think it will be better investment as this technology is not going anywhere soon.
As for .Net 4.0, WPF 4.0 does introduces some important functions in 4.0 (specially easing functions for animations) but there is nothing you cannot do without if you are using 3.5. I won't recommend 3.0 though mainly because of performance in animations.
WPF is up to the task, but you could also check other options.
You could go web based, and have either an XBAP (WPF in the browser), or Silverlight/Flash app.
Silverlight/Flash doesn't require that much from the client (to install), and is easily updatable, and both can do the job.
I am thinking about creating a screen saver. I have the whole thing, its graphics and the back-end kind of ready in my head. But I am not quite sure how to get the graphics out in code.
What I would like is a slide show of images with a bit of movement (kind of like the slide show in media center) and some floating text and shapes on top. The shapes somehow translucent.
I currently have a very simple static slideshow made in WinForms. Just a simple application that goes fullscreen and displays some images and pretends to fade them in and out in a hackish kind of way. But it is not very well made, and the performance is not very good. For example to prevent lag, I fade in a black square on top of the image, instead of fading in the actual image. Silly perhaps, but it kind of worked :p
Anyways, I would like to do a better job. But not sure where to start. Is WPF a good solution for this? Or should I look into DirectX or OpenGL? Is this something that could be handled well with XNA, or is that too game spesific?
WPF is not a bad idea. It takes advantage of DirectX and hardware acceleration for its animations and effects.
You will get better performance if you write this kind of stuff natively (against directx or opengl), but the cost of writing it will be much higher. It's quite possible you will not need that edge anyway.
Have a look at hanselman's baby smash (which is a full screen wpf app with animations) to get a grasp of what you can do with wpf.
Note: I did write a slide show kind of thingy in WPF way back, the key to getting this to work smoothly is loading up the images in a background thread and freezing it.
I guess XNA works well. There's a sample screensaver in C# Express, by the way.
Actually XNA works pretty well. For example: this is an (advanced) example of what can be made with XNA. The community is quite helpful and XNA has great potential.
A few weeks ago I wrote a two-part article describing how to create a Windows screen saver with GDI+. I am not displaying a slide show in my screen saver, but instead I am randomly drawing shapes. I did however explain the fundamentals of creating a screen saver for Windows which should be of some help if you have never created a screen saver before.
Create a Screen Saver Using C# – Part 1
Create a Screen Saver Using C# – Part 2
If you want to go with just GDI and GDI+, I wrote some info here about how to speed them up when rendering images and drawing them to screen. There is also fully functional screen saver source code at the above link (which I wrote myself after digging for some of the more obscure screen saver details), in case that helps.
Recently I finished with my first WPF (I wanted to see, how it can be done with WPF) screen-saver. You can check-it out on YouTube. Try to see HD-version.
Though I never tried XNA, I'm really pleased with WPF so far. Easy and flexible. But I guess you probably wouldn't get an XNA-performance (or am I wrong here?).
You can google for GDI+ or WPF ScreenSaver-templates to start with.