I need to knock out a quick animation in C#/Windows Forms for a Halloween display. Just some 2D shapes moving about on a solid background. Since this is just a quick one-off project I really don't want to install and learn an entire new set of tools for this. (DirectX dev kits, Silverlight, Flash, etc..) I also have to install this on multiple computers so anything beyond the basic .Net framework (2.0) would be a pain in the arse.
For tools I've got VS2k8, 25 years of development experience, a wheelbarrow, holocaust cloak, and about 2 days to knock this out. I haven't done animation since using assembler on my Atari 130XE (hooray for page flipping and player/missile graphics!)
Advice? Here's some of the things I'd like to know:
- I can draw on any empty widget (like a panel) by fiddling with it's OnPaint handler, right? That's how I'd draw a custom widget. Is there a better technique than this?
- Is there a page-flipping technique for this kind of thing in Windows Forms? I'm not looking for a high frame rate, just as little flicker/drawing as necessary.
Thanks.
Post Mortem Edit ... "a couple of coding days later"
Well, the project is done. The links below came in handy although a couple of them were 404. (I wish SO would allow more than one reply to be marked "correct"). The biggest problem I had to overcome was flickering, and a persistent bug when I tried to draw on the form directly.
- Using the OnPaint event for the Form: bad idea. I never got that to work; lots of mysterious errors (stack overflows, or ArgumentNullExceptions). I wound up using a panel sized to fill the form and that worked fine.
- Using the OnPaint method is slow anyway. Somewhere online I read that building the PaintEventArgs was slow, and they weren't kidding. Lots of flickering went away when I abandoned this. Skip the OnPaint/Invalidate() and ju