Many big buttons slowing down Form..

Question

Hello all. I'm making an Air Hockey game in C# However, i'm a newbie to the language. I have a lot of large buttons on a form to enter in your name (see it here: http://homepage.eircom.net/~basquilletj/NameScreen.PNG). I know the buttons are very big but as a game, i really need to fill out most of the screen. Anyways, all these buttons seems to slow down the form loading - any suggestions on how to fix this? Many thanks in advance. Any suggestions welcome! PS - Also, anyone have some good links to sites with tutorials / examples of games programming using GDI+ besides the C# Corner site?

Answer 1

For using DirectX (DirectDraw, DirectSound, Direct3D) you'll need DirectX SDK. It can be downloaded from Microsoft. There is a help inside SDK. You sure can use png, bmp, jpg files with DirectDraw. About forms - DirectDraw engine creates surface of drawing... you can call it a control, like pictureBox.... inside a form. So, of course it is compatible with C# GUI.

Answer 2

Thanks for the advice! GDI+ was what my lecturer told me to use for an Air Hockey game and i had no idea it was gonna be slow. You are right though - i posted code from a Pong game in GDI+ on the C# Corner Examples and it did really move at a snail's pace. Thanks again! I have no idea how to use DirectDraw - with DirectDraw, can i use the PNG / BMP / JPEG's i currently have on my form. And also, is it backwards compatible with C# (can i use C# forms with DirectDraw)? Anyone point me to some good resources / tutorials on using DirectDraw?

Answer 3

GDI+ is not for fast-dynamic pictures, it's rather for static images creation.... It's highly recommended to use DirectDraw for games creation. It's not much harder to learn then GDI+ engine, but much faster. About buttons... you can try to use imageList with all needed images, and on button drawing - assign image from imageList to button background image...

Answer 4

Urhmmm, maybe it's bad practice to write games using the GDI. GDI is famous because it's very slow. So I wouldn't recommend writting games using it. Rather try DirectX or other APIs that are designed for game development.