I am making an overlay program with C# that will have an overlay for games. I am currently using a borderless form with a transparent background and a picture box to draw pictures to the screen, but I can't click the window behind the form. I have set the form to be always on top so that I can play games and the UI stays, but every time the mouse goes over the form in the game if I click the focused window switches to my form, preventing game interaction.
I have tried using functions to just draw images to the screen without using forms, but I cannot work out how to do that.
All I want is things like an external menu/crosshair and such, for use in minecraft. As for the menu, I could make my own media controls and such, and the crosshair would be useful because I hate the default crosshair. I could draw shapes to the screen, but if I don't use pictures the crosshair might look tacky.
A possible solution is a per pixel alpha blending window.
Here is a good starting point: Per Pixel Alpha Blend in C#
The example source code should give you the idea.
Hope this helps
Related
I would like to overlay own content above a Direct3D v9 game (made by a third party).
Overlay Interactive Button
Specifically, I would like to overlay a clickable button control, like Steam does, for instance, though I'm attempting a much simpler interface.
Ideally, I would be able to overlay a WPF button or a Windows Form button or whole UserControl, but if that is not possible then creating a functioning button from primitives would suffice as well.
Text Overlay Working with SharpDX
I have a working sample of overlaying text based on the work of Justin Stenning
Namely with the help of SharpDX.Direct3D9.Font DrawText method
How to Overlay a Button or UserControl with SharpDX
I looked through relevant samples in https://github.com/sharpdx/SharpDX-Samples but was not able to find a way to include or draw native controls with SharpDX
Is it possible?
If not, are there any samples of drawing a clickable button from scratch?
Please bear in mind I'm a novice in the DirectX world :)
Your biggest problem isn't going to be getting the controls to render on top of a DX scene; it's going to be getting them to respond to input afterwards. You can probably rig up a way to get the visuals copied to a DX surface, but I have no idea how you would capture input, translate it, and deliver it back to the WPF components. If it's even possible, it's almost certainly more trouble than it's worth.
There are a couple game-oriented Xaml solutions out there that you may want to check out. WPF for Games is a partial C++ implementation of WPF based on Direct3D, and there's also the proprietary Noesis GUI.
I wanted to know whether it's possible to show a 2D Texture in XNA without a window that contains it. Just like drawing a picture/texture (maybe with the SpriteBatch.draw()-method?) simply onto the screen, independent from a seperated window. (What comes to my mind here is the Photoshop-opening window)
Is this possible in XNA? I can't find anything like this for SpriteBatch. Do I have to write totally new code/method?
If you mean splash image, it might be drawn from another application before launch (aka launcher) or you can show border-less window with image while loading application content in background.
Unfortunately XNA does not support border-less window, however there is walk-around using windows forms: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/37109/is-there-a-simpler-way-to-create-a-borderless-window-with-xna-4-0
If you will be able to create borderless window with XNA, then you need to change window size in constructor to splash image size, and draw same size image while loading content.
I would not recommend displaying splash image as it serves no real purpose, if you want to display some logo while starting the game - simply start game in fullscrean and draw image on black background while loading content, this is the way all modern games does it.
I am developing a tetris like game in winforms(C# and .netframework 2.0).
The winform has an background image and a picture-box which move down(new Location is assigned) at an interval of 500ms.
The problem is when picture-box moves down the background image of form flickers at the point where the picture-box was earlier located. If i don't use any background image, then there is no flickering.
Is there any graphics accelerator or any kind of solution using which the flickering problem can be solved.
The term used for this is Double Buffering. The idea is simple - start with 2 panes but only display one. Draw to a hidden pane, and quickly swap the hidden and visible panes. Rinse and repeat for every transition (animation).
Luckily, you dont have to deal with the nuts and bolts of this in .NET, controls do it for you. This SO question will help you: How to double buffer .NET controls on a form?
Set DoubleBuffered = true on your controls. This should help prevent flickering.
For documentation on the DoubleBuffered property, see here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.control.doublebuffered.aspx
If you are developing a game in Windows Forms you really ought to be overriding OnPaint and implementing painting of the sprites on every frame, as opposed to moving heavyweight PictureBox controls.
You will find you may get the flicker regardless of DoubleBuffer if you use the approach you mentioned. However, with all drawing done in OnPaint, then DoubleBuffer begins to work.
I did a quick search and found this interesting article on creating a game-loop in Windows Forms using OnPaint override. In particular take a look at GameStateDrawer which does the rendering directly to graphics context.
I have quite an uncommon question: Does anyone know whether it is possible to draw something on the backside of a WPF Window?
Normally people create Controls or draw images on the front side of a WPF Window. However, I would like to draw things on the backside. Here is an Image taken with the Snoop tool. Snoop has the functionality of viewing a WPF Application in 3D. Using the so-called Zoomer it is possible to look behind a window.
I would like to either draw an Image or put a Control so that you can see it with using the Zoomer functionality of snoop at the back of the application.
Has anyone got an idea of how this could be done?
Thanks,
Christian
There is no backside.
What most applications do is simply replace the control/window by another one as soon as it has rotated by 90 degrees.
How can I show a grey transparent overlay in C#?
It should overlay other process which are not owned by the application doing the overlay.
Create a transparent window the size of the whole screen, mark it always-on-top, calculate the regions of your other application windows, and make the non-window regions of the top window grey.
I suppose you could just position your own application windows on top of the transparent grey one, with it being above all the other ones, but getting a tricky z-order scenario like that right, especially in conjunction with other apps that might also be doing z-order tricks, is tough.
Here a little app which do more or less the functionnality you want :
http://www.anappaday.com/downloads/2006/09/day-10-jedi-concentrate.html