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.
Related
I've decided to learn a bit of WPF and I've created an application with the Mahapps Metro library and it interacts with a SQLite database (Unrelated but a bit of background).
I'd like to draw an object, let's say a triangle, in a new window.
I've seen this - Click - but the drawing of the shape needs to be visible to the user. So the user will see the line being drawn from point A to B to C to A. The image will "reload" after a few seconds i.e. Clearing the window/canvas and redrawing the triangle.
Are they any libraries out there that might make this easier or does WPF have something else I can use to achieve this?
Also, the redrawing of the triangle will be in a separate thread running a loop. Something tells me this isn't going to be very efficient. Is there a better way initiate a "redraw"?
My "answer" are some helpful searches and a few results that might help you get to the next step of deciding on a design that works for you.
Yes, WPF does have facilities to help you achieve some animation in drawing lines.
I searched for "wpf animate line drawing" and some interesting links for your research are:
How do you animate a line on a canvas in C#?
generating animated line
Drawing line "slowly" programmatically with wpf
Hopefully this gets you going in a good direction. Best of luck with your project.
I have to play a video in my C# program and I have to make it so that users can't interact with it, since the PC will be set in a public area.
I tried unchecking Enable Control and I also set uiMode to 'none', but CTRL+P (Pause) still works. This makes me think that other hotkeys do as well.
How can I set it so that you can't do anything with the video?
Edit:
I'm using Winforms, because it seems to be easier. I'm not really a C# developer, I have 0 experience and it resembles VB back from school.
In case you are developing WPF application, there is MediaElement you can use. It doesn't have any control for user interaction. Developer has to built it manually using buttons, progress bar, etc in case he need to provide control for user interaction.
And the usage is very straightforward :
<MediaElement Source="path_to_video-file.mp4" />
For reference :
Sample Application in MSDN
http://www.wpf-tutorial.com/audio-video/playing-video/
PS: It turns out that you are developing winform apps instead of WPF. In case this option still interesting for you to try, you can use ElementHost to embed WPF control in winform.
This is one of many tutorials available on net about how to use ElementHost control : http://tech.pro/tutorial/799/wpf-tutorial-using-wpf-in-winforms.
Have you tried putting another transparent WINDOW in front of the media player (area only if needed). While not totally befinner level, that is not exactly super science either.
As WINDOWS can go in front, that should block any interaction with the media player while - due to transparency - still showing the video.
MAybe even a control works (panel with nothing on it), but given that media player is a native control it may be needed to hide it behind a transparent window.
WOuld help to know what UI technology you use.... Winforms or WPF.
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'm trying to make a new CAD program from scratch. The GUI is mostly easy to make in C#; it's just dragging-and-dropping things like command buttons and writing their associated code.
However I want the user of my CAD to be able to drag-and-drop icons from a toolbar onto a drawing pane. I also want them to be able to resize those icons, draw connections between them, etc. And I don't know how to do this part.
After doing a good bit of research, I'm still lost on what approach I should take for it. It's basically a 2D flowsheet, so do I need hardware acceleration? Do I make C# bitmaps and just print those after modifications on mouse events? Etc.
What should I study to learn how to do this?
Thank you!
You probably need to work with WPF. You might find these articles useful
A Beginners Guide to
WPF
A Guided Tour of WPF
Drag and Drop
Drag and Drop in WPF
WPF Drag and Drop Smorgasbord
Drag And Drop in WPF Explained (an end-to-end explanation)
WPF Diagram Designer
These were the ones that help me while I was going to do something similar. Hope they will be useful to you.
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.