I am working on a multi-touch app using Monogame, where multiple users can work on a larger multi-touch screen with separate documents/images/videos simultaneously, and I was wondering if it's possible to make gestures "context-aware", i.e. two fingers pinching a document on one side of the wall shouldn't affect somebody panning the other side of the wall.
The way Monogame works is, all input points are translated into gestures, which can be read using:
if (TouchPanel.IsGestureAvailable)
{
var gesture = TouchPanel.ReadGesture();
// do stuff
}
Is there a way to make gestures limited to a certain point on the screen, or do I need to implement this myself? For example, by looking at the source code, it appears that the TouchPanelState class does all the work, but unfortunately its constructors are internal.
That feature is not built in to MonoGame, as it is not part of original XNA. Essentially you'd want more than one 'logical' TouchPanel defined by its sub-rectangle of the window. However TouchPanel is static, hence there is only one for the whole game in default XNA.
The good news is that MonoGame does its own gesture recognition. So, the code is there, you just need to make some changes to MonoGame.
Eg...
-Make TouchPanel a non-static class that can be allocated with a given subrect.
-Add non-static versions of all TouchPanel methods.
-The static methods redirect to a singleton/instance of TouchPanel, preserving the old API.
...now you can optionally allocate more TouchPanel(s) that AREN'T the whole screen.
Note: This doesn't help you, but MonoGame does allow you to have more than one OS window (on windows only afaik) in which case the static TouchPanel is the first window and there is a separate API for accessing touch input / gestures for any additional windows.
Related
I have a C# application that has an existing WinForm that I now need to display upside down.
The application will be displayed on a touchscreen Windows 7 device. If two people are using the device, one person is viewing it right-side-up while another user will be simultaneously viewing it upside-down. I will need to have one control displayed right-side-up while another control is displayed upside-down, each duplicate forms. Both need to be functional. It is not necessary for the title bar and Windows close, maximize, and minimize to be rotated.
Is there a way to easily rotate this Form and all of its contents without having to rewrite it from scratch?
Unfortunately, rotating controls is not directly possible in WinForms.
At least, not if you want them to retain their functionality. It would be relatively simple to draw the control into a bitmap, rotate the bitmap, and then draw that back to the desired location on the form. But you would obviously lose the ability to interact with the controls. They would just be static representatives of their original selves.
But making functional upside-down controls just isn't going to happen. I mean, you could try to write a bunch of custom drawing code for owner-drawn controls, but you'll still run into a bunch of bugs, corner cases, and compatibility problems. The Win32 controls that WinForms is based on just don't support this. No big surprise, really, considering they were invented some 20–25 years before anyone thought of computer screens that you could carry around in your pocket and rotate in any direction. There is a good reason that UI technologies like WPF came out around the time that touch screens and tablets did.
There are some possibilities that can be explored when it comes to flipping the entire screen, but that's not going to help when you want different controls going different directions. (And I guess it betrays my vantage point as a desktop app guy when I say this, but that just sounds like an incredibly confusing UI.)
If you absolutely have to have this, someone else is going to have to give you another route to hack it, perhaps along the lines of Dhawalk's comment: hosting the WinForms control inside of a WPF app that does provide built-in support for rotated controls. I don't know enough about this to make any concrete suggestions down that path. From a few minutes of searching, it appears that WindowsFormsHost does not actually support rotation transforms, so this may be a non-starter anyway.
I think a lot of people used application "Fraps" for recording video from game. I use it for displaying FPS (frames per second) in the games. Fraps can show digits at the corner of screen when game runs.
I want to display core temperature of processor. The temperature I will find, but I need to khow, how can I display it in the game? (I need it for testing core temperatures in the game, because stress tests of Everest/AIDA64 doesn't much load the system).
Want to use C# (but can listen to all solutions, C++, Java)
Example games: Dirt2, Call of Duty 5 (DirectX)
P.S. This post was similar...
c# text/winForm overlay video games like xfire,PIX,steam,fraps etc
What you want to do is a bit more complex than you might think. There are different sources on the web about this, some might be a bit outdated. A good search Term is "Hook direct 3d", there are also other threads on stackoverflow about this topic. A good thread is also this.
One advice: You are changing the runtime code of the game, which can be detected by anti cheat mechanism and can cause banning if the game is a multiplayer game. It is even possible that widely known applications like fraps are on some sort of whitelist against these checks, but i'm not sure about that.
An alternative to what you want could be to make your form always stay on top (form.TopMost = true;). Then you can set the transparency color the same color as your form (by default it would be form.TransparencyKey = System.Drawing.SystemColors.Control;). After that you can remove the border of your form (form.FormBorderStyle = System.Windows.Forms.FormBorderStyle.None;).
Be careful not to use the transparency color anywhere else (it'll make part of images transparent if it contains this color).
Make sure to have a way of closing the form. (and moving it if needed).
I'm trying to implement a simple game - I've written a dial control but having trouble writing a on-screen thumbstick in Silverlight for Windows Phone - this would be a large circle - say 150px wide with a 25px circle which when held down moves round the centre much like a real thumbstick - like the Xbox 360 controller thumbsticks.
I'm finding creating this a little tricky - if there are any examples such as a Joystick one I can shrink down for example? Been trying to create something for ages and can't seem to figure it out - the centre circle is loaded from an Image and the Larger one too so it can be customised - getting the two to be within each other centred is the easy part!
As discussed, i'd suggest using XNA doing it since its considerably easier to do. With Mango you could combine XNA and Silverlight and therefore satisfy your needs for some Silverlight too.
Look at this example:
http://create.msdn.com/en-US/sample/touchthumbsticks
It shows how to easily create a thumbstick control. To restrict the area which you can touch, just create a new Rectangle at the position of the thumbstick with the size you desire and use the .Contains(...) overload to check if the position of the tap is inside it and then act accordingly (update the stick, or ignore input).
Check out the .Contains(...) function and its overloads:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/de-de/library/microsoft.xna.framework.rectangle.contains.aspx
I have learned that many programmers tend to stick to Silverlight for they think XNA is some kind of holy grail and is complex to program. It is not. It just needs a bit of getting used to, but you will surely enjoy the ride to XNA enlightment. I can tell, i did :) It's fun! Just trust a stranger on the internet!
If you need to stick to Silverlight and Pre-Mango, i fear i can offer nothing of value for you, and i fear you will suffer pain in trying to recreate the same functionality XNA already offers programmers for no charge.
I have been fooling around with screen capture for awhile now and I managed to capture the entire screen, certain areas on the screen etc...
But when I go into a game and try to capture the screen, it completely ignores the game and instead, captures the desktop (or whatever is behind the game window).
Another interesting fact is that the same thing happens with the PrtScn button.
Any ideas on how to capture a game's screen?
The screen capturing technique you are using works well for capturing things that aren't hardware accelerated. I suspect you'd have the same problem trying to capture a movie frame in Windows Media Player.
The solution is the do a screen capture from the hardware itself using DirectX. This article explains how to do that with some code and a managed wrapper around DirectX called SlimDX.
EDIT
If Slim DX doesn't work for you, then you'd just have to find another managed wrapper around Direct X. I don't think you are going to be able to do the screen capture without working at the hardware level, and DirectX is the means of doing that on the Windows platform.
OK, I am sure some of you already know whats happening just by my title, since I get this is very common question. But my question is in fact little deeper, so please be patient wíth me.
All my programing I have done in past years were in Assembler, mainly 8051 and AVR as weel as in C, but also for microcontrollers. I was more fascinated by HW than SW. But I am also fascinated with function of OS, its APIs and so on. Few days later I told my friend that to create a very simple program to plot a function graph should be very easy, if you had math parser. He doesent believed me so I tried to make one.
I decided to go with C#, even I have no knowledge of OOP. But I thought that if I get everything done in one buttons action it would be like good old C.
So I get math parser to work, and than started to draw using Pen object. My first attempt was to draw simple line. After reading one tutorial a managed to do so, and I created simple axis for my plot.
But than I noticed something strange, when I minimalised my program, drawing dissapears. This made me think a bit about how this all drawing is done on system level.
I thought that system hold image of active window untill its changed. So when you move your windows it just changes its position in famebuffer. And when you minimase it, it just skips it during drawind to framebuffer.
But I saw its not like this. So, please, could you tell me why is this happening? I can read how to prevent it in many tutorials, but I would want to know more why. More, wheather this is becouse of how system API works, or becouse how C# drawing class works.
Also, this made me think what in C# and .NET libraries is function thats just a call for WinAPI function that works exactly the same way, and how many libraries and function do something more. Like if there was no function to draw line in GDI, and you could only draw dot, than C# would add function to draw line from this dots. I hope you understand me.
Thank you.
This is how it works in the Win32 API. When the window is minimized, the area which it occupied gets "invalidated" so the windows system knows that this area of the screen needs to be redrawn. This leads to a WM_PAINT message being sent to the windows program(s) responsible of drawing that area. You can read more about invalidating the client area (the area of which your program is responsible) here.
If you're truly interested in this stuff and want to get deeper understanding on how the system handles drawing (and other things, like windows messages), I recommend reading more on the Win32 API, e.g. beginning on Charles Petzold's classic, Programming Windows.
Your drawing didn't disappear, it simply isn't there. Bear with me:
to draw on the windows window, you have to respond to the callback indicated by the WM_PAINT message. It was in Win 3.11 and it is so NOW.
to draw on button click is a waste of time, because next form/control/window repainting will draw background color there
move the same code from button event handler to OnPaint - of course, handle the differences in semantics
windows don't save the copy of your screen buffer - your drawing - so you have to save it somewhere or draw it on-the-fly
In Windows (prior to Vista / DWM and MIL) the application is responsible for drawing its own GUI. That is, the application has to paint its own GUI When the operating system tells the application to do so. Resizing or moving a form will trigger the paint event. This is how it works in User32+GDI. That is, the application draws its own pixels.
A WPF application will however use the Media Integration Layer (Vista and Windows 7) and the "mil core" is responsible for drawing the visual tree of the application. In this case the operating system is responsible for the rendering, but the application is responsbile for what it wants to be rendered.
If you want to plot, use microsoft chart controls.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=130F7986-BF49-4FE5-9CA8-910AE6EA442C&displaylang=en
or ZedGraph
http://zedgraph.org/
If you want to plot yourself: The window is redrawn when you resize.
You need to redraw your plot on the redraw event, or whatever it is called.
That is perfectly normal.
Also, use .NET 4.0, because else, you have no possibility of removing anything you drawed programatically, unless you remove (repaint) everything.